Will's blog

purpose: Will Kahn-Greene's blog of Miro, PyBlosxom, Python, GNU/Linux, random content, PyBlosxom, Miro, and other projects mixed in there ad hoc, half-baked, and with a twist of lemon

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Mon, 30 Jan 2012

Migration to Trac: How some small projects balloon into massive projects when you have good intentions and you're not paying attention

Since around July, I've been working on migrating MediaGoblin from Redmine hosted on the Foocorp servers to Trac hosted on our server. The project looked small enough initially, but then suffered from a series of complications that turned the small project into a big project that took about 6 months and involved writing about 5000 lines of code. Pretty crazy. I don't even want to estimate how many hours I spent on it. Oy.

It wasn't a terrible project, though. Parts of it were educational. I'd written scrapers in Java and Perl a long time ago, but hadn't written anything with Python, lxml, and cssselect [1]. I read through parts of Trac and Trac's db schema. I also read through Trac plugin code.

The best part about it is that it's done now. This gives the GNU MediaGoblin project more autonomy and also more flexibility for adjusting the project to meet their specific needs. That's good stuff---time for cake!

[1]cssselect is amazing. Many thanks to Asheesh for telling me what I was doing was silly and to use cssselect since it's way easier to use. As a side note, Asheesh is teaching Web scraping: Reliably and efficiently pull data from pages that don't expect it at PyCon 2012. If you get the advice I got, it'll be awesome.
[ tags: dev, mediagoblin, python | category: /gmg | Permalink | View/Add Comments: 0 ]

Sat, 03 Dec 2011

phil 1.0 released!

Mediagoblin has monthly project meetings. One of the things I wanted to automate was meeting reminders that gets sent x days in advance, contain the link to the Meetings page in the wiki, and specify the date and time of the next meeting. I figure if we automate it, it's one less thing we have to think about---it just happens.

To do this, I decided to write phil. For the most part, it's sort of a throw-away project, but it was so small that I decided to go through a complete project development cycle with it and make sure it had all the bits a mature Python project should have: proper packaging, license, configuration, tests, project infrastructure, ...

I think it took about 10 hours over the course of 2 weeks. I was learning the icalendar library and python-dateutil and also figuring out exactly what I wanted it to do as I went along. For a small project like this, that's fine. For a larger project, I'd prefer to spend more time researching and designing ahead of time.

It was nice to "take a vacation" and put all the other projects I normally work on on hold to throw something together from scratch.

[ tags: dev, mediagoblin, phil, python | category: /dev | Permalink | View/Add Comments: 0 ]

Mon, 02 May 2011

from identi.ca

"we hit our first 0.0.1 milestone for !gnu # pretty psyched about that, too. (forgot the !gnu part in prev dent--bad me!)"

[ alternate | related | ostatus:conversation | ostatus:attention | mentioned | self | edit ]

[ tags: dent, gnu, mediagoblin | Permalink ]

from identi.ca

"also, we hit our first 0.0.1 milestone for # pretty psyched about that, too. it's been a busy month."

[ alternate | ostatus:conversation | self | edit ]

[ tags: dent, mediagoblin | Permalink ]

pyblosxom::1.5-dev git-master

Copyright 1996 to 2012, Will Guaraldi Kahn-Greene, under the Creative Commons BY-SA 3.0 license

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