Category Archives: Technology

Elastic Load Balancing, Auto Scaling, and Amazon CloudWatch

The load balancing, auto scaling, and cloud monitoring features are now available for Amazon AWS. The features work together to help you to build highly scalable and highly available applications. Amazon CloudWatch monitors your Amazon EC2 capacity, Auto Scaling dynamically scales it based on demand, and Elastic Load Balancing distributes load across multiple instances in [...]

Django Best Practices

“This is a living document of best practices in developing and deploying with the Django Web framework. These should not be seen as the right way or the only way to work with Django, but instead best practices we’ve honed after years of working with the framework.”

Read the article in full – Django Best Practices.

Amazon Elastic MapReduce

Hadoop as a service. Basically a web based GUI around Hadoop – you could roll this yourself on EC2 but for a small markup on regular EC2 prices you get to avoid the extra work setting everything up. Data processing scripts can be written in Java, Ruby, Perl, Python, PHP, R, or C++ and are [...]

Real World Django

There’s plenty of material (documentation, blogs, books) out there that’ll help you write a site using Django… but then what? You’ve still got to test, deploy, monitor, and tune the site; failure at deployment time means all your beautiful code is for naught.

Read Read World Django as it unfolds the tutorial which examines how best [...]

Washington Times releases open source projects

The Washington Times has released few open source projects. Visit Washington Times Open Source for more.

The Washington Times has used open source projects for some time now. All of our servers run Ubuntu linux. Our database servers use PostgreSQL. Our web servers use lighttpd and Apache httpd, and memcached. We develop entirely in python, using [...]

Rails versus Django

“These are the sorts of differences seen in both stacks. They are common, and commonly pivotal to arguments comparing the two frameworks. Proponents of one framework typically argue one way ‘because it is the way decreed by our language authors’. So really you’re looking at which language you prefer.”

(Via: SuperJared)

Typogrify: easily produce web typography that doesn't suck

Typogrify is a collection of Django template filters that help prettify your web typography by preventing ugly quotes and widows and providing CSS hooks to style some special cases. Read more about Typogrify from Jeff Croft.

100% on Amazon Web Services: Soocial.com

Soocial Web application: Nginx running behind an Elastic IP, proxying the request to an HAProxy on every “webapp” instance, each of which has its own memcache server (they don’t need to explicitly expire the cache). The reason they use Nginx is to supply SSL support, if HAproxy would do SSL they probably wouldn’t be using [...]

Django-AWS

Patrick Altman have started a new app over on github called django-aws. It’s a small re-distributable django app providing some lightweight integration with Amazon Web Services.

All set to move to Slicehost

Fixed all outstanding issues on Slicehost just now. We are now all set to move to Slicehost. Yay!