Blog posts

This is a short recap of how I managed to lock myself out of the root account of an Amazon EC2 Ubuntu instance and how I gained control again.

Google’s Webmaster Tools provide the modern webmaster/developer with some nice tools to improve a website and the way the site is indexed. In this article I’ll focus on the crawler related tools. Specifically, how they helped me when I migrated from Plone to Django.

After this website migrated from Plone to Django, the comment spammers found my site more interesting. Instead of five spam comments a year, I suddenly got the same amount per week. Although those comments were never published (more on that later), it did annoy me. By no longer displaying the comment form below the blog entries, the problem of the spam seems to be solved. While this wasn’t my goal, it is a nice side effect.

When migrating from Plone to Django, I had problems with editing weblog entries with a dot in the url. Apparently Django doesn’t allow dots in a SlugField. Here’s how I solved it.

While updating a buildout, Pound would not compile anymore. “All” I did was update it from version 2.4.4 to 2.5.

In April Packt published Django 1.1 Testing and Debugging by Karen M. Tracey. After reading it I figured I might as well write a review.

After a comment by Matt Hamilton on Twitter about the lines of code in my website project I listed in my previous weblog entry, I decided to dive in a bit deeper.

This site is now powered by Django instead of Plone. Yes, I’ve finally made the switch!

The summary: as of today, you no longer need to checkout enablesettrace from the Zope Subversion repository. You can just use the Products.enablesettrace egg to debug your restricted Python code.

On 19 February I held a presentation for my colleagues about distributed version control systems (DVCS). My main goal was to inform them on what I think is the next logical step in source control.