http://blog.ianbicking.org Sat, 13 Mar 2010 00:15:22 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Lately I've been writing code using WebOb and just a few other small libraries. It's not entirely obvious what this looks like, so I thought I'd give a simple example. I make each application a class. Instances of the class are "configured applications". So it looks a little ... http://blog.ianbicking.org/2010/03/12/a-webob-app-example/ Since I've been thinking about `deployment `_ I've been thinking a lot more about what "configuration management" means, how it should work, what it should do. I guess my quick summary of configuration management is that it is *setting up a server correctly*. "Correct" is an ambiguous term, but given ... http://blog.ianbicking.org/2010/03/10/configuration-management-push-vs-pull/ As of last week, I am now an employee of Mozilla! Thanks to everyone who helped me out during my job search. I'll be working both with the Mozilla `Web Development (webdev) `_ team, and `Mozilla Labs `_. The first thing I'll be working on is deployment. In part because ... http://blog.ianbicking.org/2010/03/10/joining-mozilla/ After some pondering at PyCon, I decided on a new name for toppcloud: **Silver Lining**. I'll credit a mysterious commenter "david" with the name idea. The command line is simply ``silver`` -- ``silver update`` has a nice ring to it. There's a new site: `cloudsilverlining.org `_; not notably different ... http://blog.ianbicking.org/2010/03/03/toppcloud-renamed-to-silver-lining/ No, I should say *forms particularly*. I have lots of things to blog about, but nothing makes me want to blog like *code*. Ideas are hard, code is easy. So when I saw `Jacob's writeup about dynamic Django form generation `_ I felt a desire to respond. I ... http://blog.ianbicking.org/2010/03/01/throw-out-your-frameworks-forms-included/ I haven't received a great deal of *specific* feedback on toppcloud (**update**: renamed Silver Lining), only a few people (Ben Bangert, Jorge Vargas) seem to have really dived deeply into it. But -- and this is not unexpected -- I have already gotten several requests about making it more ... http://blog.ianbicking.org/2010/02/10/why-toppcloud-not-agnostic/ After three and a half years at `The Open Planning Project `_, my time there is done. For a while TOPP has been trying to find itself, to determine what it is that it can do best, and how to do that. I think TOPP has finally started really figuring ... http://blog.ianbicking.org/2010/02/09/leaving-topp/ I've been looking at `Weave `_ some lately. The large-print summary on the page is *Synchronize Your Firefox Experience Across Desktop and Mobile*. Straight forward enough. Years and years ago I stopped really using bookmarks. You lose them moving from machine to machine (which Weave could help), but ... http://blog.ianbicking.org/2010/02/06/weave-client-side-data/ I wrote up instructions on using `toppcloud `_ (**update**: renamed Silver Lining) with Django. They are `up on the site `_ (where they will be updated in the future), but I'll drop them here too... Creating a Layout ----------------- First thing you have to do (after installing toppcloud of course) is create ... http://blog.ianbicking.org/2010/02/05/toppcloud-and-django/ Deployment is one of the things I like least about development, and yet without deployment the development doesn't really matter. I've tried a few things (e.g. `fassembler `_), built a few things (`virtualenv `_, `pip `_), but deployment just sucked *less* as a result. Then I got excited about `App ... http://blog.ianbicking.org/2010/01/29/new-way-to-deploy-web-apps/