Recently at work I was faced with a problem. We use an outsourced CRM solution so I send lead forms directly to them. Things work but the only solution they have for spam control is using a captcha. A solution I’m not particularly fond of. Especially since one of those forms is in the footer of our site and it would just be flat out ugly. I was already using the wonderful jQuery validation to validate form input so I wanted to find a way to tie it all together.…

A while back I started a blog using Ghost to try it out. Webfaction made it easy by having a 1 click installer for it almost immediately after it was available. The site has been up and running for a while and I noticed that there have been several upgrades since I installed it so I wanted to upgrade to the latest version. Here is how I did that. Note that these instructions will only work if you installed Ghost using the Webfaction installer.…

I really like Mezzanine and use it all the time in projects. It powers this site you’re on now. There are a couple of things that often “bug” me about it though. One is that I don’t understand why Stephen chose to bake his own thumbnail plugin and didn’t just use sorl.thumbnail. Sorl is much more flexible and powerful. For instance I can add margin and center an image when resizing it to give uniform whitespace around images while preserving the aspect ratio, something the built in thumbnail tag can’t do.…

Been way too long since I’ve posted something here. Life has been busy. Isn’t that the excuse everyone uses? I’ll change the theme up soon. Don’t want anyone’s eyes to bleed! Regardless this weekend I really wanted to get Owncloud set up on one of my Webfaction servers. I’ve used Dropbox, Sparkleshare, Bittorrent Sync for years and even tried a few other file sharing apps along the way. I set up Owncloud way back when on Amazon hosting for a client and it worked well but this latest release seems way better.…

We recently switched our live website at work to the new Django backend I had created. With that our old Magento instance can go away! Well, sort of. I still may need to reference it in the future so I needed to replicate the Magento install locally. Our Magento version was old (1.3.2.4) and I work on a Mac so I needed a way to duplicate the server environment. Enter Vagrant.…

This is what happens when you get sucked into the massive incarceration complex in the United States. I read the excellent book - The Innocent Man - by John Grisham a few years back and the previous linked story brought back so many feelings from reading The Innocent Man. I remember hating the feeling of helplessness brought on by the complete irrationality, stupidity and downright corruption of some in law enforcement and our criminal justice “system” after reading that book.…

At work today I needed to force a new line break in a PDF that I was generating using Reportlab at work today. I tried just adding a newIine using the standard \n, like you would in python, but it seems that the Paragraph class in reportlab swallows the newline character. I found that just entering a standard html break tag worked though. Something like this: header_row.append('MSRP <br />($USD)') In this case the output is…

It truly does. At my home I have one choice for internet service of any kind. Comcast. Google Fiber is just 10 minutes away. But we like where we live. Still, sometimes I find myself wishing we were willing to move for a decent internet provider.…

Having been born and raised in the good ol’ USofA I like to think that I appreciate what a great country America is. I love most things about it. But it seems that past few decades I’ve always had a feeling that something is just not right with our government and leadership. I’m not talking from a political party stance here at all. I stumbled on this article today. Any government that allows and condones such actions is simply wrong, wrong and wrong.…

As I’m changed work a few times the past few years I’ve had to get a Django install up and going on each new machine I’ve used. Here’s a quick run through to get a local development environment for Django up and running in Mavericks in no time. First off, we need install pip so we can get the other packages we need. sudo easy_install pip We’ll want to use virtualenv so we can have multiple Django versions and python environments.…