Posts by lennys (68)

lennys December 09, 2023

I have to figure out what to do next.

So I'm kind of at a point at which I'm stuck. I have this blog, which I want to add Markdown to, and also build a sitemap for it. I also have a broken "Contact Us" form in my LS Enterprises site I need to figure out and fix, and at some point I intend to work on building an API for my lennyshort.com site. I also want to setup Ansible on my Cisco gear just for the point of it, which I think requires setting up a separate server. I have a small server I'm not using for anything at the moment. Then there's the Python Crash Course book, which I want to finish working my way through. I'm not sure which project should take priority at this point. I guess I need to do some brainstorming on what direction to go in next, but at the moment I'm feeling tired and unmotivated. What's my long-term goals here? I'm going on vacation again in a couple of weeks for Christmas. This time I'm driving to Mom's house in Oregon for a few days. I'm getting a rental car for the drive there and back again, because my truck is still not really dependable and I don't want to get stuck somewhere in the mountains if it breaks down. I managed to get almost all of my Christmas shopping done yesterday, I just need to find something to get for my nephew. He recently turned 21 and is starting welding school in January, but I don't know what kind of gear he needs yet. The other kids were easy to shop for, they just got STEM toys, Legos and some PlayDoh. Maybe I'll just get him a gift card to Lowes or something. I'm still waiting on the new engine for my truck to arrive. I got a call yesterday from the shop manager who said that it didn't arrive yesterday like he was told. I'm lucky that the current engine is still running. If this keeps going on delay after delay I might just try to cancel the engine swap and see if I can get my deposit back, and just drive the truck until it dies then take it to the junkyard. Had I known what I was getting into with this situation, I would've just traded it in for a new'ish truck instead. Anyone want to buy a 2003 Dodge Dakota?

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.

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