Tag / Django

by Kévin Dunglas

Jouons un peu avec Tweet13

Voici Tweet13, le dernier petit gadget Twitter que je viens de programmer.

Comme son nom l’indique, Tweet13 chiffre vos updates Twitter avec ROT13 et ajoute optionellement un lien pour déchiffrer le message.

Quel intérêt de chiffrer un message si tout le monde peut le lire ?
Révéler la fin des films que vous avez vu, donner la réponse à de petits quizz que vous avez créés ou encore parler plus crument que d’habitude sans choquer vos followers sensibles 🙂

Tweet13 à été développé avec Django, JQuery et l’API Twitter.

Voir Tweet13.

by Kévin Dunglas

Build your own website thumbnail generator with Django

On many website you can see a awesome link preview effect using a thumbnail of the page. There is some web services such as Websnapr or Thumbalizr providing an API to make your own webpages screenshots but it can be annoying to rely on third party projects: free accounts can only display a small among of screenshots and, cannot customize the size of the image, you cannot render Flash animations or Javascript…

Webkit Logo

We will build a website thumbnail generator using CutyCapt, a Webkit based free software designed to make screenshots of web pages, and Django, the powerful Python web framework.

The first step is to download and install CutyCapt. On a Debian-based system (such as Ubuntu) just type the following commands:

sudo apt-get install subversion libqt4-webkit libqt4-dev g++
svn co https://cutycapt.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/cutycapt
cd cutycapt/CutyCapt
qmake
make
./CutyCapt --url=//dunglas.fr --out=example.png

Try to open the example.png (i.e: eog example.png), if the install is OK you must see a screenshot of this blog.

I assume your Django installation is working fine. Start a new project if needed (django-admin.py startproject mysite) and create an application called webthumb

with python manage.py startapp in your project.

Django Reinhardt

Edit your urls.py file to add a new pattern to the tuple urlpatterns. It will match screenshots requests and call the thumb view:

(r'^thumb/(?P.*)', 'mysite.webthumb.views.thumb'),

Now create a view called thumb in webthumb/view.py with this code:

import os
import subprocess
import md5
from django.http import HttpResponse

CUTYCAPT = '/home/dunglas/cutycapt/CutyCapt/CutyCapt'
THUMBS_DIR  = '/home/dunglas/Documents/Projets/kakofony/thumbs/'

def thumb(request, url):
    hash = md5.new(url).hexdigest()
    path = THUMBS_DIR + hash + '.png'
    print path

    if not os.path.isfile(path):
        try:
            subprocess.check_call([CUTYCAPT,\
                '--url=' + url,\
                '--min-width=200',\
                '--out=' + path])
        except subprocess.CalledProcessError:
            return django.http.HttpResponseServerError

    img = open(path, 'rb').read()
    return django.http.HttpResponse(img, mimetype='image/png')

Adapt the variables CUTYCAPT and THUMBS_DIR with your settings. Of course the directory pointed by THUMBS_DIR must be writeable (chmod 777).

You can now embed website thumbnails in your websites just with this HTML markup <img src="http://localhost/thumb///dunglas.fr" alt="Lapin Blanc" />.

Enjoy !

by Kévin Dunglas

The last update of Aptana block Django development server

The last update of Aptana Studio come with a new built-in Jetty-based HTTP server running on port 8000… the same as Django development server. There is no good way to disable the preview server feature of the popular editor, but our favorite web framework can be launched on another port. Just type python manage.py runserver 8080 instead of python manage.py and access to your work on http://localhost:8080.

Django logo