Blog

How many Django developers deal with small sites?

2017-04-11

I read blogs, I listen to podcasts, I look at conference talks, all about deployment, and the impression I’m getting is that everyone’s problem is how to serve one billion requests per nanosecond. What the heck, am I the only one who makes small sites? [Read more…] about How many Django developers deal with small sites?

An easy tip to quickly access the Python reference

2017-03-31

If you are like me, you visit the Python Standard Library Reference all the time. You already know there’s a “datetime” module, a “random” module, an “os.path” module, and so on, so how do you quickly go there to read the reference? Here’s what I do.

Why care about deployment?

2017-03-09

Do you know that in Heroku you can enter a single command and have your Django project deployed for you? If there are services that have commoditized deployment, why should you care about nginx, Apache, PostgreSQL, Gunicorn, systemd, and all that, and don’t you spend your time and grey matter on something more useful?

History of the URL, or why you are confused by serving many domains with a single server

2017-02-15

I’ve noticed that many people attempting to deploy Django have trouble understanding how a single web server installation can serve many domains. One reason is that words matter. What Apache calls a “virtual host” is exactly what nginx calls a “server” and what HTTP calls a “host”. It is neither a host (let alone a virtual one) nor a server; it’s a domain. Let’s clear this up.

How reliable is my virtual server?

2017-02-02

Digital Ocean advertises its services as “cloud computing”, and sometimes refers to its virtual servers, its “droplets” that is, as “cloud servers”. Reader Chris Pantazis asked me if this means it has less downtime than a provider that doesn’t advertise them in this way. The answer is that “cloud” doesn’t mean anything at all. In this post I explain how virtual server providers minimize downtime.

How to fix Django’s HTTPS redirects in nginx

2017-01-24

You deploy with nginx and Gunicorn and your site uses HTTPS. If Django occasionally returns HttpResponseRedirect or similar, you may find that the redirect sends you back to HTTP. Here’s how to fix it.