lennys December 04, 2023

Setting up email is a pain

So I was trying to create a "Contact Us" page in my LS Enterprises site. I found a couple of tutorials online that were pretty straightforward, worked through them, and eventually cobbled together a basic finished product. It has 3 fields: the sender's email address, the Subject line of the email, and the email body. Below that is the "Send" button, and that's it - no styling so far. In Django, you can configure it to send the email out to the console, so you can run tests and read the emails that are generated in the console. This part works, but when I try to flip it to actually send an email, the system throws an error in a strange way - it only allows emails to be sent that are addressed to the recipient email address, the email address that is hard-coded into the Django backend. So it essentially sends the email from email@domain.com to email@domain.com. Which is useless. Furthermore, it throws an error when you type in any other email address for the sender, i.e. user@otherdomain.com. So the email never gets out of Postfix on the server, and never arrives at the recipient. I've been around and around on this issue for the last 3 days and I can't figure out how to fix it. I've tried reconfiguring Postfix to no avail, it seems as though nothing I change has any effect. So I'm a little frustrated with this now, and I'm thinking of other alternatives. I could use a service like SendGrid to handle the sending of the emails, but I'd have to rely on their free tier of service, which could go away at any time. I'd rather not do that, as I have my own mail server, and it's working properly. I think I'm going to have to re-write a lot of Django code to rearrange things, or else I'm stuck. I'm thinking of things I want to incorporate in the future into my websites. lennyshort.com is a very basic Django-driven site and isn't very impressive, so I'd like to redesign it and use an API to connect the Django backend to a React frontend. I recently worked my way through a book that covered that, so I think I could do it. I also still want to incorporate Markdown into this blog to make it prettier, plus setup an Ansible server to administer the Cisco switches and routers I have in my cabinet at work. But it seems that no matter what I try, I eventually run into an issue like this email problem that I can't solve. I posted a question on ServerFault about this and got one reply, which I appreciate, but I'm still stuck on this one. Anyone got any ideas?

lennys November 30, 2023

Update

So it's been 2 weeks since my last post. A lot has happened in that time: I finished up my Django & React book (although I still have some bugs to work out), went on vacation to Texas for Thanksgiving, and got eaten alive by some fleas that were hiding in the bedding at my brother's house. They have a couple of cats, and were horrified by my affliction but after a thorough housecleaning all is well. Better me than the kids, I say. All in all, I had a good visit, got to see my extended family and even got my hands dirty working on one of my brother's vehicles. I'll be seeing them again for Christmas at Mom's house in 3 1/2 weeks. Looking forward to it. I found and worked through another online tutorial today. This one was about making Markdown work in a Django project, and was pretty easy. I got it done in just a couple of hours, so now the next step is implementing it on this blog. I'll have to remove Summernote, but I couldn't get that to work anyway so no loss there. I'm doing this because I want to be able to use code highlighting in my posts, plus Markdown can do just about everything Summernote can do just as well. After that, I'm not sure what bells & whistles I want to include in this blog. Time will tell.

lennys November 16, 2023

Website planning, etc.

So I bought another Django book. This one covers Django APIs and React, so I'm hoping I can get something useful out of this one. It's a small book, only has 138 pages, but hopefully it'll cover the meat of the material without any fluff. I'm thinking about going through the Django projects I've done over the last year and trying to fix some bugs in the code. I've covered a lot of ground but still have far to go. I'd like to build another website that uses Django as the backend and something like React for the frontend, but I don't know JavaScript well enough to feel very confident. Hence, the new book. My main website is about 5 months old, and I'm already thinking of ways to improve it and/or replace it entirely. What I'd like it to be in the long-term is a site that hosts my resume, has a small amount of information about me and has links to some of the projects I've built. When I was developing it back in June-July I ran into an issue I couldn't figure out - I created two apps named "Projects" and "Blog", but when I tried to add links to them on the front page Django threw an error. After trying and failing to find a solution, I disabled the links so I could get the site online and have something worthwhile to show off. My LS Enterprises site is just a brochure site that I'm going to build a "Contact Us" page for, with a form people can fill out to send me an email, a working Captcha, maybe a few other things but I'm not planning on putting anything very extensive there unless I figure out a business plan. My other site, trixelated.com, still has the Local Library website I built from the Django tutorial hosted by Mozilla in their developer docs, and other than this blog it's the only fleshed-out site I have at the moment. Eventually I'll replace it with something else, but I have a lot to figure out first, and plenty of other things to do along the way. On a side note, I'm still waiting on the new engine for my truck to get here. I talked with the shop manager on Tuesday and he told me it was on a pallet waiting at some warehouse somewhere, and he'd find out when it would get here on Friday or Monday. I'm really hoping this new engine is in good shape, because I've been through enough nonsense with this truck already. It's cost me a small fortune just to keep it going, and at this point I've spent more money than the truck is worth. I just hope we can get the new engine installed and I can drive the truck for another 3 years, to get my money's worth out of it. Things at work are humming along like usual, it's pretty quiet so I'm able to work on my coding projects and stuff. There are hiccups in the network occasionally but for the most part everything's been fine as far as I know. I hope it stays that way.

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