Trials in Snake Charming

Did some research today and found a solution to my need of pulling image content from a target website on a schedule. There is an api called Cron that lets you schedule “Cron jobs” that do exactly what I need.

So my two new short term goals are to implement Cron into my funny pages project, and to figure out a view that presents my images on a clean, easy to read page.

Eric agreed to spend each Monday night helping me kickstart a new week of coding. Tonight with his help I set up a github repository for funnypages, activated the admin page, and repaired my media root. I’ll spend the rest of the week looking for a way to check sites for updates and grab their images.

In between gorging on leftovers and messing with my new Xbox, I got a good bit of django work in. I now have a much stronger understanding on how url files, views, and html templates work in concert in a django app. I’m also starting to visualize how this will work in my funnypages app. I’m feeling good about having some kind of alpha version of the site running by the new year!

My second run on the Django tutorial should wrap up today.  I’m excited to apply some of my new insights to my own project, which I am calling funnypages.  For one, I think I have a much firmer grasp on customizing django’s admin interface.  That will be my main focus during the coming week.

Other great news, one of my brothers is going to hook me up with an account that features high quality video tutorials on programming and web development.  That should keep me busy through the holidays!

As far as the new toy, I’m waiting for my Xbox One to arrive in the mail.  Unfortunately target couldn’t get it to me on launch day…

How about you?  Are you tinkering around with a brand spanking new PS4 or Xbox One this weekend?  Let me know how you like it if you are!

I just updated to Pycharm 3.0 today. As I’ve mentioned in my road to success section, Pycharm is the IDE that I use to do my python coding. JetBrains just released version 3.0.

Two important things to mention. For any of my programmer friends that use PyCharm and have a license, keep in mind that it does expire eventually, so grab Python 3.0 and install it now so you can use your existing license code.

The second thing is really big. For those of you that can’t afford to invest $100 in an IDE right now and would rather test the waters, PyCharm 3.0 is the first version to have an absolutely free open source version!

I’ve come to a realization about my project.  I don’t think I’ve described it in detail before but I basically wanted to make it so that a user could simply punch in the urls of some sites hosting images, and it would grab those images whenever they updated and lay them out in a sunday comics style interface for you to peruse.  I thought this would be very simple, but I’m realizing now that the part where the user can just punch in a url and everything works is overly ambitious right now.  So rather than create this universal app that anyone can use with little effort, I’m going to make an app that requires a lot more input on the data you want to pull for my own personal use and that of my friends.

In programming (be it apps, games or otherwise) it is very easy to get wrapped up in a project and not realize when you are overreaching.  I’m hoping with this adjustment in my goals that I’m avoiding this age old trap…

So I got the image field variable to work finally.  My hunch about not being able to use a URL as input was correct.  I’m guessing there may be a way to create a path to a url within your own directory structure and call it that way, but that is an issue for another day.

As far as today’s problems are concerned, it turns out that all the times I tried to call file field on a url it created bad rows of data in my django projects database, so now I am looking for a way to remove lines of data from your database using the django shell.  On we go!

Wonderful news!  My wife is back from her two week training voyage in Califronia.  With her here to take the evening watch with the kids, I can redouble my efforts on my Django project.  Look forward to some real progress reports in the coming weeks.

I spent the weekend helping my sister-in-law door knock for her city council campaign, and I got to use an app that I’ve done contract work on! Using an application that contains some of my code (albeit a teeny tiny bit of it) has been very exciting. I need to keep at my own project so I can have an app that’s all me. I’ll keep moving forward!

My wife went away for a two week training trip for her new job today. I took most of this week and the weekend to spend time with her and the kids, so no programming update today.