I’ve been thinking about an import/export API for PickyWiki; I want something that’s sensible, and works well enough that it can be the basic for things like creating restorable snapshots, integration with version control systems, and being good at self-hosting documentation.
So far I’ve made a …
One of the constant annoyances to me in web applications is the self-proclaimed need for those applications to know about everything and do everything, and only spotty ad hoc techniques for including things from other applications.
An example might be blog navigation or search, where you can only include data …
In a little wiki I’ve been playing with I’ve been trying out little ideas that I’ve had but haven’t had a place to actually implement them. One is how notification messages work. I’m sure other people have done the same thing, but I thought I …
Following onto a set of recent posts (from James, me, then James again), Martijn Faassen wrote a description of Grok’s version management. Our ideas are pretty close, but he’s using buildout, and I’ll describe out to do the same things with pip.
Here’s a kind of …
James Bennett recently wrote an article on Python packaging and installation, and Setuptools. There’s a lot of issues, and writing up my thoughts could take a long time, but I thought at least I should correct some errors, specifically category errors. Figuring out where all the pieces in Setuptools …
When people think about web scraping in Python, they usually think BeautifulSoup. That’s okay, but I would encourage you to also consider lxml.
First, people think BeautifulSoup is better at parsing broken HTML. This is not correct. lxml parses broken HTML quite nicely. I haven’t done any thorough …
In an effort to get back on the blogging saddle, here’s a little note on default values in Python.
In Python there are often default values. The most typical default value is None — None is a object of vague meaning that almost screams “I’m a default”. But sometimes …
I attended PloneConf 2008 recently, to talk about Deliverance. But I’ll talk here more about my observations as a relative outsider to that community. (This post is really written for the Plone community — if you aren’t familiar with Plone this post probably won’t make much sense or …
I’ve finished renaming pyinstall to its new name: pip. The name pip is a acronym and declaration: pip installs packages.
I’ve also added a small feature intended for Google App Engine users, allowing you to zip and unzip packages in an environment. For instance:
$ pip zip --list In …
Roy T. Fielding, author of the REST thesis wrote an article recently: REST APIs must be hypertext-driven. I liked this article, it fit with an intuition I’ve had. Then he wrote an article explaining that he wouldn’t really explain the other articles because, I guess, he wanted a …