A while back I described fassembler and one of the things I liked in it is how the configuration works. It uses a conventional declarative INI-style but also allows arbitrary code, so that defaults can be based on each other.
Here’s a basic example of a default configuration …
At TOPP there’s a lot of traffic discussion, since a substantial portion of the organization is dedicated to Livable Streets initiatives. One of the traffic ideas people have gotten excited about is Woonerf. This is a Dutch traffic planning idea. In areas where there’s the intersection of lots …
A couple posts have got me thinking about cultural imperialism lately: a post by Guido van Rossum about “missionaries” and OLPC not about OLPC at all, a post by Chris Hardie and a speech by Wade Davis.
Some of the questions raised: are we destroying cultures? If so, what can …
I’m not a designer, but I spend as much time looking at web pages as the next guy. So I took interest when I came upon this post on font size by Wilson Miner, which in turn is inspired by the 100e2r (100% easy to read) standard by Oliver …
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 …