Nuno Mariz Weblog

Django 1.0 roadmap and timeline
June 12, 2008 @ 9:38 a.m.

Finally we have a Django 1.0 roadmap and timeline. Jacob Kaplan-Moss posted today on Django devolopers.
I must say this roadmap seems very realistic and the only thing that I will miss is the aggregation support, that is promised to be released in a future version, maybe in 1.1.

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My goal was to archive and display my internet lifestream. My first approach was writing a client for each API of the social networks that I'm in.
This turned out to be a complete waste of time and effort. All that I needed after all was a FriendFeed account that would centralize all my feeds.

Archiving and displaying your entries with Django is quite simple.
First of all, you need to download the Python FriendFeed API client. Then start a new application in your project, lets call it lifestream:

./manage.py startapp lifestream

On the settings.py add the lifestream project to the INSTALLED_APPS and a variable to store your FriendFeed username:

FRIENDFEED_USERNAME = 'your_username'

In the models.py add a model named Entry:

from django.db import models

class Entry(models.Model):
    id = models.CharField(max_length=255, primary_key=True)
    service_id = models.CharField(max_length=50, null=True, blank=True)
    service_name = models.CharField(max_length=50, null=True, blank=True)
    service_icon = models.URLField(max_length=255, verify_exists=False, null=True, blank=True)
    service_profile = models.URLField(max_length=255, verify_exists=False, null=True, blank=True)
    title = models.CharField(max_length=255, null=True, blank=True)
    link = models.URLField(max_length=255, verify_exists=False, null=True, blank=True)
    updated = models.DateTimeField(null=True, blank=True)
    published = models.DateTimeField(null=True, blank=True)
    media_title = models.CharField(max_length=255, null=True, blank=True)
    media_link = models.URLField(max_length=255, verify_exists=False, null=True, blank=True)
    media_thumbnail = models.URLField(max_length=255, verify_exists=False, null=True, blank=True)
    created = models.DateTimeField(auto_now_add=True)

    def __unicode__(self):
        return self.title

    class Meta:
        ordering = ['-published']
        verbose_name = 'Entry'
        verbose_name_plural = 'Entries'

    class Admin:
        list_display = ['title', 'service_name', 'published']
        list_filter = ['service_name']
        date_hierarchy = 'published'

Create an url.py on the lifestream folder:

from django.conf.urls.defaults import *
from lifestream.models import Entry
 
entry_list_dict = {
    'queryset' : Entry.objects.all(),
    'paginate_by' : 30,
}

urlpatterns = patterns('',   
    (r'^$', 'django.views.generic.list_detail.object_list', entry_list_dict),
)

As you can see, I've used a generic view. You can also use the date based generic views and pagination to build an archive like mine.

Add to your project root urls.py:

(r'^lifestream/', include('lifestream.urls'))

Create a template lifestream/entry_list.html:

{% for entry in object_list %}
<div class="source">
  <a href="{{ entry.service_profile }}" title="{{ entry.service_name }}"><img src="{{ entry.service_icon }}" alt="{{ entry.service_name }}" alt="{{ entry.service_name }}" /></a>
</div>
<div class="details">
  <ul>
    <li><a href="{{ entry.link }}">{{ entry.title }}</a></li>
    <li>{{ entry.published|timesince }} ago</li>
    {% if entry.media_thumbnail %}<li><a href="{{ entry.media_link }}"><img src="{{ entry.media_thumbnail }}" alt="{{ entry.media_title }}" /></a></li>{% endif %}
  </ul>
</div>
{% endfor %}

Finally, create a script to synchronize your feeds:

#!/usr/bin/env python
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-

import sys
import os

ROOT_PATH = os.path.realpath(os.path.dirname(__file__))
PROJECT_PATH, PROJECT_DIR = os.path.split(ROOT_PATH)

sys.path.insert(0, ROOT_PATH)
sys.path.insert(1, PROJECT_PATH)

os.environ['DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE'] = '%s.settings' % PROJECT_DIR

from friendfeed import FriendFeed
from django.conf import settings
from lifestream.models import Entry

ff = FriendFeed()
feed = ff.fetch_user_feed(settings.FRIENDFEED_USERNAME)

for e in feed.get('entries'):
    entry, created = Entry.objects.get_or_create(id=e.get('id'))
    if created:
        service = e.get('service')
        entry.service_id = service.get('id')
        entry.service_name = service.get('name')
        entry.service_icon = service.get('iconUrl')
        entry.service_profile = service.get('profileUrl')
        entry.title = e.get('title')
        entry.link = e.get('link')
        entry.updated = e.get('updated')
        entry.published = e.get('published')
        media = e.get('media')
        if media:
            entry.media_title = media[0].get('title')
            entry.media_link = media[0].get('player') or entry.link
            thumbnails = media[0].get('thumbnails')
            entry.media_thumbnail = thumbnails[0].get('url')
        entry.save()

If you want, you can add a job in your crontab:

# synchronize every 15 mins
*/15 * * * *   root   /path/to/your/application/lifestream_cron.py

See my lifestream as the working example.

UPDATE: Friendfeed sends the time in UTC, if you want to use your timezone you have do some hacking:

Install pytz:

easy_install pytz

Import and assign your timezone to a variable:

import pytz
tz = pytz.timezone(settings.TIME_ZONE)

And replace entry.updated and entry.published with:

updated = e.get('updated')
updated = updated.replace(tzinfo=pytz.utc).astimezone(tz)
published = e.get('published')
published = published.replace(tzinfo=pytz.utc).astimezone(tz)
if settings.DATABASE_ENGINE == 'mysql': # http://code.djangoproject.com/ticket/5304
    updated = updated.replace(tzinfo=None)
    published = published.replace(tzinfo=None)
entry.updated = updated
entry.published = published

Thanks to Chris Kelly that send me an email reporting this.

Django has a code error notifications mechanism when a view raises an exception. It will email the people in ADMIN tuple(settings documentation) in settings.py with the full exception information and displays the default 500.html template.
This only happens when DEBUG=False in the settings.py.

It's possible to set a handle that change this behavior with a handler500 variable in the root urls.py.
So, we can easily write a simple view that sends an error notification to our jabber account.

First of all, you need to install xmpppy and dnspython:

$ easy_install xmpppy
$ easy_install dnspython

Add to settings.py the jabber parameters such as the jabber id, password, recipient, etc.:

JABBER_ERROR_NOTIFICATION = True
JABBER_ID = 'your_jabberid@jabberdomain.com'
JABBER_PASSWORD = 'your_jabber_password'
JABBER_RECIPIENT = 'recipient@jabberdomain.com'
JABBER_ERROR_TEXT = 'An error occurred in "Project Name", please check your email.'

Start a new app named errors or something else and add it to the INSTALLED_APPS tuple in the settings.py:

python manage.py startapp errors

Add a handler500 variable with the view in the root urls.py:

handler500 = 'errors.views.server_error_jabber'

Finally add the view in errors.views that sends a jabber notification and returns a 500 error page:

from django.views.defaults import server_error
from django.conf import settings
import xmpp, time

def server_error_jabber(request, template_name='500.html'):
   if settings.JABBER_ERROR_NOTIFICATION:
       jid = xmpp.protocol.JID(settings.JABBER_ID)
       cl = xmpp.Client(jid.getDomain(), debug=[])
       conn = cl.connect()
       if conn:
           auth = cl.auth(jid.getNode(), settings.JABBER_PASSWORD, resource=jid.getResource())
           if auth:
               id = cl.send(xmpp.protocol.Message(settings.JABBER_RECIPIENT, settings.JABBER_ERROR_TEXT))
               # Some older servers will not send the message if you disconnect immediately after sending
               time.sleep(1)
   return server_error(request, template_name)

NOTE: Don't forget to set DEBUG=False in the settings.py.

A simple templatetag for adding to the template context a variable with the user timeline from Twitter.
It uses the CachedContextUpdatingNode snippet for caching from Jacob Kaplan-Moss.
The reason that is necessary to cache content is because Twitter limits the number of accesses to the API.
This only works if the cache is enabled on your settings.py.

class TwitterNode(CachedContextUpdatingNode):

    cache_timeout = 1800 # 30 Minutes, maybe you want to change this
    
    def __init__(self, username, varname):
        self.username = username
        self.varname = varname

    def make_datetime(self, created_at):
        return datetime.fromtimestamp(mktime(strptime(created_at, '%a %b %d %H:%M:%S +0000 %Y')))

    def get_cache_key(self, context):
        return 'twitter_user_timeline_cache'

    def get_content(self, context):
        try:
            response = urllib.urlopen('http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/%s.json' % self.username).read()
            json = simplejson.loads(response)
        except:
            return {self.varname : None}
        for i in range(len(json)):
            json[i]['created_at'] = self.make_datetime(json[i]['created_at'])
        return {self.varname : json}
    
@register.tag
def twitter_user_timeline(parser, token):
    bits = token.contents.split()
    if len(bits) != 4:
        raise TemplateSyntaxError, "twitter_user_timeline tag takes exactly three arguments"
    if bits[2] != 'as':
        raise TemplateSyntaxError, "second argument to twitter_user_timeline tag must be 'as'"
    return TwitterNode(bits[1], bits[3])

Usage:

{% twitter_user_timeline username as twitter_entries %}
{% if twitter_entries %}
  {% for entry in twitter_entries %}
  {{ entry.created_at|date:"d M Y H:i" }} - {{ entry.text }}
  {% endfor %}
{% endif %}

Use the source, Luke.

iPhone says Welcome to Django
August 20, 2007 @ 8:50 p.m.

0 comments | Filed under django, iphone, python | add to del.icio.us
Portuguese translation of Django in the trunk
March 21, 2007 @ 2:47 p.m.
The Portuguese(pt_PT) translation of Django is now in the trunk.
```
svn co http://code.djangoproject.com/svn/django/trunk/
```
0 comments | Filed under django | add to del.icio.us
Portuguese translation of Django
March 16, 2007 @ 11:08 a.m.

I've submitted the Portuguese(pt_PT) translation of Django, meanwhile you can download the unofficial version in the downloads section.

3 comments | Filed under django | add to del.icio.us