Category Archives: Programming
Python Static Site Generators
So, I have this personal project I’m working on that involves having a static site with information about products, combined with a storefront. I don’t need the majority of the dynamic features of something like WordPress, so I wanted to … Continue reading
A Python Physics Sandbox
One of the labs I give to my Intro to Computer Science students is writing an interesting physics simulation. I started using that lab when we were using the Calico IDE, an educational IDE that comes with some built in … Continue reading
Laravel 5.2’s Authentication
I recently started using Laravel 5 (after having written a fair amount in Laravel 4) and was excited to find authentication built into Laravel 5. Well, you do have to execute “artisan make:auth” after you create your project, but after … Continue reading
Kivy Widget Colors
So, I’ve been playing a bit with using Kivy for programming mobile applications. I chose Kivy for a couple of reasons: 1) I like Python, and am always looking for an excuse to use it 2) Cross platform compiling is … Continue reading
Using Views To Generate Emails
The Web2py book has a section on using views to generate emails. As far as it goes, it’s a nice technique and is explained well, but briefly, in the book. One of the things that isn’t mentioned, though, that comes … Continue reading
Keeping Flexible on Database Design
One thing that writing for Google App Engine is teaching me is that you have to keep flexible on your database design. Google App Engine doesn’t like joins, so you have to avoid them. However, there isn’t just one technique … Continue reading
Many To Many Using Google App Engine Lists
I ran across a case today where I needed a many to many relationship, but denormalizing the relationship to make it faster on Google App Engine would have meant duplicating almost all the data on the table. Since I did … Continue reading
File Uploads and Downloads
Web2py supports file uploads and downloads out of the box. That’s an important part of what I need to do with my site, so I decided to test it early. I created a model with a field whose type was … Continue reading
Getting Current User’s Email
Web2py has a lot of documentation, but you’ll find things you want to do that simply aren’t covered (at least, not where I could find). One of those is getting the current user’s information, such as email, first name, last … Continue reading
Simple Authentication
Web2py includes, out of the box, a basic registration and login mechanism. What’s missing is you saying what pages should be accessible to which users. There are two components to this. First is removing menu items based on the user … Continue reading