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Aug
31
One of the best programmers I know is selling a web application on eBay, that he’s been developing and running for the past three years. Given the starting price and considering what one lucky person or company will walk away with, I must say, it’s an amazing deal. I’m writing about his auction here so that I can help it get the proper exposure it deserves and because I think it’s an incredible bargain for anyone who is interested!
BlogBabel, the aforementioned site/web app, is a blog indexing and aggregation service that began in 2006. Amongst its features are the ability to detect and show the most popular blog discussions, weekly posts, books, videos, and even popular blog entries based on their location (through geotagging). It also features leaderboards of the most popular blogs.
Its codebase uses Python and Django, and consists of 27,359 physical lines of code (roughly equivalent to 6.46 person-years, according to sloccount). The R&D alone makes this application worthwhile to an interested party.
At this stage, BlogBabel has an Italian interface (located at it.blogbabel.com) and aggregates almost 15,000 Italian blogs and 5 million posts. Changing the interface to make it an international project that’s available in several languages, or switching to English (solely), would not be challenging in the least (they used to run a Spanish version as well, for example, but decided to discontinue it so as to focus on the Italian one).
BlogBabel has been featured in the mainstream Italian media and has had a noticeable influence on the Italian blogosphere. One could argue that it has been the yellow pages of the Italian blogosphere. Because of this, Ludovico Magnocavallo (the site’s creator) received substantial offers to buy BlogBabel in the past, but he turned them down because he wanted to continue building this site. Now however, due to personal circumstances and lack of time/resources, he’s willing to sell this application for what may amount to far less than its true value. And here’s the real bargain, the starting price, without a reserve, is 4,999 Euros. This is of course, a ridiculously low price for the value being offered. But Ludovico believes in letting the market decide.
If I had the funds lying around, I would buy it myself and gear it towards the English speaking world (in conjunction with the pre-existing Italian version). It’s a prepackaged, virtually ready-made startup with a great deal of potential both in its current state and in terms of what it could grow to become.
To recap, the auction includes:
- The domain name blogbabel.com (it.blogbabel.com has a pagerank of 6);
- The full codebase (almost 30,000 lines of code);
- A database containing 3 years worth of data relating to the Italian blogosphere (more than 30 GB, lots of data-mining opportunities);
- 4 hours of work to help you with setting up the site on your own servers.
BlogBabel has been running smoothly for three years, and is currently under-marketed. Optimizing ads, affiliates, and similar sources of revenue wouldn’t be hard at all, especially if one were to aim this site at the English speaking world.
Also, Ludovico has already implemented most of the code that’s necessary to allow users to have accounts (through OpenID), but since these “social features” are not fully implemented yet, they have not been deployed in production. A buyer could decide to disregard them or finish implementing them and roll out a technorati-like service. The winner of this auction could decide to implement support for Twitter, comments on social networks, sentiment analysis, etc, on their own. The possibilities are really limitless when you start with a solid engine and crawler, and already have a great deal of data at your fingertips.
I know Ludovico and he’s a stand-up guy. If you are interested in this great deal, you can bid here. If you have technical questions about this auction, please feel free to contact him directly through eBay.
UPDATE (September 8, 2009): Ludovico received an undisclosed offer for the site and a few years of maintenance work, so the auction for the site alone was suspended.
Aug
6
I’m glad to announce that the API team has just released version 1.0.2 of the adapter for Django. And on my birthday to boot, what a nice present. This version extends its support to the recently released Django 1.1, as well as incorporating the feedback that was received earlier on. 
(For installation instructions, take a look at the README file.)
IBM confirms its commitment to support Python and Django, and gives Django well deserved credentials in environments where having IBM’s support counts. Django is becoming an increasingly mature web framework with the potential to do well within the Enterprise world. Having support for DB2 will surely help.
The next step will be working with the Django team to bake DB2 support directly into Django’s releases. The code for the adapter is released under a liberal OSI-compliant license that is compatible with Django’s own BSD, and the API team is more than willing to work on the development and support of the adapter should it become part of Django. We love Django and ponies. Let’s make this happen, guys.
Jul
22
Serving Django Static Files through Apache
Filed Under Django, Python, Quick Tips | 11 Comments
Django’s development server is capable of serving static (media) files thanks to the view django.views.static.serve. Popular web servers like Apache, Lighttpd or NGINX are much faster though, and as such should be used in production mode. Our goal is to bypass Django and let Apache (or other valid alternatives) directly serve static files like images, videos, CSS, JavaScript files, and so on, for us.
Generally speaking, for performance reasons, it’s advised that you have two different webservers serving your dynamic requests and static files. In practice, for smaller sites, people often opt to simply use one webserver. In this article, I’ll discuss how to serve the static files within your Django project, through Apache.
The first thing we need to do is distinguish between development and production mode. We can do so by simply specifying DEBUG = True (development), or DEBUG = False (production) within our settings.py file.
settings.py may include (among others) the following declarations:
# Absolute path to the project directory
BASE_PATH = os.path.dirname(os.path.abspath(__file__))
# Main URL for the project
BASE_URL = 'http://example.org'
DEBUG = False
# Absolute path to the directory that holds media
MEDIA_ROOT = '%s/media/' % BASE_PATH
# URL that handles the media served from MEDIA_ROOT
MEDIA_URL = '%s/site_media/' % BASE_URL
# URL prefix for admin media -- CSS, JavaScript and images.
ADMIN_MEDIA_PREFIX = "%sadmin/" % MEDIA_URL
*PATH constants indicate paths on your filesystem (e.g., /home/myuser/projects/myproject), while *URL constants indicate the actual URL needed to reach a given page or file.
Notice that it’s not unusual to have a /site_media URL that corresponds to a /media folder. In the example above, I opted to separate regular media files for the project from the standard ones that ship with Django for the admin section. To do this, all we have to do is create a symbolic link as follows:
ln -s /usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/django/contrib/admin/media /path/to/myproject/media/admin
When you’re in development mode, and DEBUG = True, you want to let Django serve your static files. This can be done by adding the following snippet (or similar) to your urls.py:
if settings.DEBUG:
urlpatterns += patterns('',
(r'^site_media/(?P<path>.*)$', 'django.views.static.serve', {'document_root': settings.MEDIA_ROOT}),
)
In production mode, the code contained within the if clause will not be executed as we’ve set DEBUG to False within settings.py.
From the Django side of things, we are good. We now need to instruct Apache. Within your virtual host file, you can specify something along the lines of:
<VirtualHost *:80>
#...
SetHandler python-program
PythonHandler django.core.handlers.modpython
SetEnv DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE myproject.settings
PythonDebug On
PythonAutoReload Off
PythonPath "['/usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/django', '/path/to/myproject'] + sys.path"
#...
Alias /site_media "/path/to/myproject/media"
<Location "/site_media">
SetHandler None
</Location>
</VirtualHost>
The first group of declarations essentially tells Apache to use mod_python to handle any incoming requests. However, we don’t want Django to deal with static files, so the second group of declarations, aliases/maps the /site_media URL with the actual media directory on the server, and tells Apache to threat it as static content (with SetHandler None) bypassing de facto Django.