lennys October 29, 2023

Sitemap trouble

So yesterday and again today I tried and failed at getting Django's dynamic sitemap generator to work in this blog. I followed a tutorial I found on learndjango.com and was able to get the tutorial's sitemap to work, but implementing it into my blog wasn't so simple. The tutorial was written by the same guy who wrote my Django for Beginners book, and it was easy enough for me to understand, but I seem to have trouble whenever I try implementing things on my own. Yesterday morning I managed to get the robots.txt working in this blog and in my main site after working through another tutorial on learndjango.com. Today I wasn't so lucky. I have a bad habit of picking things to do that are outside of my comfort zone and/or area of expertise, and then beating my head against a brick wall when they don't work right. I started working with Django a few years ago because of another Python book I bought, which had a very basic tutorial in the last chapter, so it seemed logical to continue with that kind of thing. But now, I can't help but wonder if I'm just wasting time with this shit. I'm going to forget about the sitemaps for now, and focus on my next book, Django for Professionals. Maybe there will be something in this book that will help me understand things. I really wish I had someone with similar expertise who I could consult with, but for now the best option I have is to post a question on StackOverflow.com, and hope that there's someone out there who can get me pointed in the right direction.

lennys October 27, 2023

Django for Beginners and Heroku

I finished up the Django for Beginners book yesterday. The book was pretty well put-together. It had six projects to work through, and I found it to be a pretty useful guide for the simpler parts of Django. I'm going to start working through the next book, Django for Professionals now. I expect I'll be using Heroku again for this book's projects, but I'd like to find a way to host these things on my own server. I may give that a try in the near future. Some of these projects are live now on Heroku. I signed up for Heroku's $5 monthly package since they did away with their free tier last year. It's not too hard getting a project up and running on Heroku, but you do need to have at least a basic understanding of Git and the command-line. I would have preferred hosting these projects on my own server, but unfortunately the book didn't cover that. I'm not posting any links to these Heroku projects yet, mainly because I'm a little concerned about security. The apps are pretty basic and some of them skipped over the security aspects, for simplicity's sake, so I'm going to think about what to do with them to make them more secure.

lennys October 23, 2023

Blog titles are hard...

Today started out with me reading through my CCNA notes for about an hour (I think). It's slowly coming back to me now. I'll need to start messing around with my Cisco switches and routers again to see where I'm really at, but I think I can figure it out. I'm just glad I don't have to make a living with the Cisco stuff right now, because I'd be in trouble otherwise. I also spent a few hours going through my Django for Beginners book. I started this a couple of days ago, and I'm working through the lessons all over again. The thing that makes this challenging is that Django has released a whole new version of itself since I bought the book a few years ago, and because of that I've run into some issues with the book's code not being up to date. I've been able to figure it out okay so far. Right now I'm building a Newspaper project, but I haven't got to the point where I build the newspaper itself yet. So far it's been about setting up the user login system, email authentication etc. I'll probably start on building the newspaper app itself on Thursday, provided nothing blows up in the meantime. I had to re-setup my account with SendGrid to get the email password reset features working, and that was a bit of an ordeal since they had deactivated my account from a few years ago. I had to setup a whole new account with a different email address, so I used my lenny@lennyshort.com email address to get things going. That was the first time I had logged into that mailbox in over a month, but it doesn't get any email really. I'm not looking forward to the day when the spammers discover my email address.

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