Yesterday, a post I had submitted to Hacker News got pushed up to the front page. Outside of retiring and basking in my new-found internet fame, I wanted to show what a few hours on the front-page looks like.

One of my lockdown projects was to make my sit/stand controller smart. I used a Raspberry Pi to create a custom controller that could control the motor on my desk and allow me to rise and lower it over the network as well as via a touch-interface.

It only took 5 years. After years of dithering you can upload images with Django Pagedown.

Most of the time, deployment sucks. Using a continuous integration app can help automate your deployments so you can focus on writing code and buildings things. In this post I'll show you how to set up a basic Django project with CircleCI so that publishing your code is as simple as pushing to GitHub.

It can be tricky to properly configure ember-ajax to play nicely with ember-simple-auth. You will need to manually configure a service to mimic the authorisation functionality you get for free when using Ember Simple Auth with Ember Data. This post will show you how to get up and running properly.

/"Data down, actions up/" is an often repeated mantra of the Ember community, and for good reason. Sometimes though, you need to call actions on components in a "downward" direction. In this post I'll give you an approach for breaking this DDAU rule.

There are a couple of different libraries for Ember that add the ability to set the page title for each page in your application by simply creating a title property on each route. This is a great general purpose pattern for declarative information that needs to be set across routes. For example you might want to add breadcrumbs, or just a different heading on each page. This post will outline how to go about creating this pattern yourself.

Ember's ethos of 'components everywhere' makes it really quick and easy to make reuseable widgets. This takes the tedium out of implementing some of the more basic features of web sites and applications. An example of this is pagination. This post shows you how to create a very basic pagination component that allows you to page through a list of items.

HTML5 makes it really easy to create elements that can be both dragged and dropped. This is a really powerful API to add rich functionality to your application. In this post we'll use this API to make a simple Ember component that can be repositioned on the screen by dragging it with the mouse.

Using a 'Teensy' microcontroller/USB HID you can easily create physical push buttons for your project that, when pressed, will appear as key strokes in your application. This is a really flexible approach to adding physical buttons to an array of different web, desktop or even mobile applications. This post will show you how to do it.

Using off-the-shelf parts with a Raspberry Pi, you can make a remote controlled power switch to turn appliances on/off. I've used this approach to create Twitter controlled snowblowers, remote controlled car headlights, a Twitter activated Christmas trees ... the possibilities are endless. This post will show you how to set up a power switch that will activate when a certain hashtag is posted to Twitter.

This post shows you how to create a custom marker component that integrates the Leaflet.label add-on to get nice pop-up labels on your ember-leaflet maps.

As of Django 1.9, there are a number of new permission mixins you can use with your views to make access control easier. One that isn't included by default is a mixin allowing you to only permit users who have activated their account (user.is_active = True)

Fastmail recently updated their SSL certificate, breaking my offlineimap email backups. This post has the updated cert_fingerprint value you need to add to get it back running

Save yourself writing the same queries time and time again by creating a simple model manager with common queries for your generic foreign keys

When you are using phpMyadmin on MAMP or MAMP Pro out of the box, you might run into trouble trying to import large databases due to PHP's default upload and timeout settings. This post explains the quick-fix needed to get it working.

This post outlines a simple Django app that allows the user to upload an image via an URL while making sure the image file is valid.

One of my most popular Stackoverflow answers is to a question regarding the confusion between static and media files in Django. This post elaborates on that theme.

In a previous post I outlined a sane folder structure for a new Django project. Since then Django 1.5 (and 1.6) has been released along with an updated default folder structure. This post goes through some further tips on keeping your django project layout sensible.

A very nice and clean way to deploy a Jekyll (or any other static generated site) is to setup a very small application on your sites webserver to listen for post commit hooks from Bitbucket. This allows you to have your site automatically updated and regenerated every time you push to your repository. This post shows you how.

I was recently getting this error while trying to deploy a new project to production. It turns out that due to a recent security update, you need to make sure that the incoming host name in your request is valid.

Sorl-thumbnail has a sensible crop function in the default engine, but sometimes you need a little more control over the results. This post provides a custom cropping PIL engine that can be used to return specific, i.e. from (x1, y1) to (x2, y2), cropped thumbnails

If you update request.POST or request.GET in a view (or else where), any subsequent calls to request.REQUEST will still return values from the old, outdated GET and POST dictionaries.

It's very easy to generate URLs to your django models using get_absolute_url(), but you can also use this pattern to just as easily create URLs to the admin page for your django models too. This post shows you how to make a get_admin_url() model method that generates links to give you quick access to your admin.

When using GenericRelations with Django to create unique generic foreign keys between objects, it can become tiresome having to navigate the RelatedManager every time you need to retrieve the single instance of the one-to-one relationship. This post shows how creating a quick Mixin can help overcome this inconvenience.

Django's annotate method can be useful for counting particular attributes on every member of a queryset (i.e. count the number of books an author has). Unfortunately you can't use the ORM to do any filtering on those attribute. This would be useful for only considering an attribute if it were above a certain value, or belonged to a certain object (i.e. count the number of books with the tag 'Horror'). This post shows how to make use of the extra method Django provides to create filtered annotations

Fandjango is a great application for getting a Facebook Canvas application up and running. It provides a nice view decorator to ensure a user is authorised with Facebook before allowing them access to that view. This post provides a piece of middleware that makes use of that decorator, allowing you to enforce Facebook authorisation on all views in your application.

When beginning with Django I always found it difficult to decide on basic project layouts. What should go where and why? Having read many of the great articles on the topic already out there this post outlines how I have come to manage the folder structure of most of my new Django projects, making sure everything is tidy and safe

When the generated URLs of your objects depends on a field in your model that could potentially change (for example a slug field that is generated from a title which your editor just changed), you can get yourself into trouble with Google as your old URL will now return a 404. This posts outlines an approach to dynamically create redirects whenever an objects changes an url dependant field.

If you are checking your settings.py into Git, make sure you aren't including any potentially sensitive information such as database passwords, secret keys and so on. A quick and easy way to avoid this is to create a separate sensitive.py file.

Django's select_related QuerySet method is a great way to reduce the query count when joining tables but it should come with small print in the documentation. This post goes over that small print.

At times you need to use both sorl.thumbnail and easy_thumbnails in the same template. Both of these apps define a thumbnail template tag from a thumbnail template module meaning that you will be able to use one or the other but not both. To get around this, you can install a great app called django-smart-load-tag

I'm a big fan of using Virtualenv (and virtualenvwrapper) where possible. It allows you to cleanly manage multiple Python environments. I also occasionally use CodeRunner to test, debug and run standalone scripts. It wasn't immediately clear to me how to make CodeRunner run inside one of my virtualenvs so this post gives a quick outline on how to get the two to work nicely together.

I encountered a strange problem when making use of a custom AppHook with django-cms. When I mounted a custom app on a cms page, reversing the urls in the template for that app (using get_absolute_url) was producing incorrect urls.