Provisioning a new Ubuntu server for Django

Posted by on June 25, 2010.

I've been a long-time satisfied user of Webfaction, but recently I've had a strong urge to move to VPS hosting so that I can have greater control over the environment. After some research, I went with Rackspace Cloud because of the incredibly cheap low-end options. My site doesn't use a huge amount of bandwidth, so Rackspace looks to be the most feature-packed and still cost-effective option. A friend of mine, Kevin Whitaker, recently posted a great article about getting up and running with Django in a server environment for testing or production. He used Ubuntu, Postgres, Nginx, and FastCGI to make up his stack. I've never set up Nginx before, so his post was a great help in getting Nginx configured. My stack is slightly different, however, since I prefer to use Gunicorn instead of FastCGI and I use supervisord to manage my processes. I also use virtualenv to manage ...

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Switching from Linux to Mac

Posted by on October 6, 2009.

Embracing Minimalism Over the course of the last year, I've slowly gone through a major shift in my philosophy about technology and about life in general. I've begun to see the great value of minimalism, and as a result I've begun to strive for elegant simplicity. For a long time, I've almost obsessively tinkered with my computer setup, both software and hardware. I have been a long time Linux user, and as soon as I got a stable setup I'd always be eager to update to the latest alpha or daily build so that I could get things working again. With web development, I would often start a project and get excited about it, and then start another one at the same time, and then another. In my personal life, I would get interested in something and I would pursue it 110% - spending hours perfecting guitar solos, writing fiction, ...

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Automated Webfaction DNS Override Updates

Posted by on December 9, 2008.

I use DNS overrides with WebFaction to point several subdomains to my home servers. My internet service provider, however, provides my router a dynamic IP address that changes every time my DSL modem is disconnected and then reconnected to their system. Each time this happens, it disrupts service to the home servers because WebFaction is still pointing to the old IP address. I decided to do some searching on the WebFaction forums to see if there was an easy solution to this issue. I was happy to see that I was not the first one with this issue, and WebFaction's solution was to write an XMLRPC API function allow users to create and delete DNS overrides with their own code. Reading through this post reminds me of why I love WebFaction so much. Their customer posed the question to them on December 29th, and despite the New Years holiday their ...

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