Neohawk.Info

This article in the NY Times came across Neohawk IT this morning. Looks like Amazon offers three new services for ecommerce or online financial transactions; Amazon Checkout, Amazon Simple Pay, and Flexible Payments Services(for developers). Amazon will now compete with Paypal and Google Checkout.

Strikes me that advantage with Amazon is that a whole lot of people have accounts at Amazon and won’t need to register their information like credit cards again, but can take advantage of what they already have registered. That’s handy.

I’ll need to check out the pdfs and code samples to see how easy it is to integrate into a website. I have one in mind for which Amazon may be the better solution than what we have now.

Some nice nuggets today. Or chunks really. It all started with chunks.

django-chunks actually.

One thing led to another and I came across Clint Ecker’s post on Django-chunks. Simply put, django chunks is a django application that allows you to add chunks of text or whatever into a flatpage template. The chunks can be added and edited in the admin section. I had created something similar, which I called “sidebars”, but this is vastly more simple.

It looks to be a handy time to find it, since I forsee using it on a project I’m currently working on. Or at least based on django-chunks anyway.

Do you feel lucky punk?

So as I look more around “Officially Lucky“, I find even more goodies from Clint.

Clint also points out some other tools/template tags that I think I will find useful as well. One he mentions is dbtemplates, which stores your django templates in the database and you can edit them via the django admin screen. Handy that.

He’s also building a feed aggregator, called Django Galaxy, as he found that feedjack was not exactly what he needed. Feedjack is the django-based software that runs my Planets, Planet NEO, Neohawk IT, Planet Ohio-Japan, and Planet Uchina. Don’t get me wrong, it works well, and as the author of Feedjack says in the comment to Clint’s post above, it can be added to another site/project.

I have yet to download django-galaxy yet, but I fully intend to, as it appears it will be more to my liking. For example, one of his frustrations was:

cant easy fit into existing site/project

And that’s the situation here at neohawk.info. Each of my planets is in fact a separate website. I also would’ve liked to incorporate it into one application. At this point, I probably won’t switch, but I’m definitely going to download it and give it a shot.

He also has yet another project for incorporating friendfeeds. As I’m not a user of friendfeeds yet, this goes on the backburner’s backburner.

note: I wrote this post a while ago, but had it in draft. I’m publishing it today, August 1st. Sorry about the delay….

I have successfully used Amazon’s Simple Storage Service for the first time. It’s one of those things that’s been on my to do list, but I just never got around to it. However, in the next week or two, I’ll be contracting to build a really simple small website and I thought it would be a perfect opportunity to use S3. But before that, I needed to test it out, and this morning was the perfect time to do so:

So I created a bucket on S3, and uploaded some of the stylesheets from this site to format it. Looks pretty good if you ask me. Although to really get it right I need to tweak the html some more, but for testing purposes it was perfect.

I had some starts and stop with S3 trying to figure out how to use it. Some of the references I used are:

• Adrian Holovaty’s “How I’m using Amazon S3 to serve media files”
• Ben Cooper’s “S3 Demo Using Django”
• Patrick Beeson’s “Using Amazon S3 with Django”
• Siddhi’s Screencast: Using Amazon S3 with Django

Next step on the learning curve is to think about using the Amazon Simple Storage Service code for django and trying to integrate it into an application. I’ll need that for the end user of the website I’m going to be developing.