If your family (or classroom or workplace) does “gift circles,” where everyone buys a gift for exactly one other person in the group, you could do (and probably already do) do the old “pull a name out of a hat” thing. But that takes setup time: writing down names, cutting them out, finding a hat, passing it around… shouldn’t this process be automated? Here’s a little Python script to get it done fast.
Category Archives: Python
Using the Workday API with Python and the suds client
Given a Workday Employee_ID, returns the last name of that employee.
I had trouble finding working examples online of interacting with the Workday SOAP API
via Python – both the authentication piece and data retrieval. It turns out to be very simple,
but it took a while to come up with due to scant documentation, so posting here in case
anyone finds it helpful.
Scraping MP3s with Python
A quick Python scraper script which takes a page URL as an argument, then locates all MP3 links on that page and downloads them to the current directory. Requires BeautifulSoup and Mechanize.
To run:
cd somefolder
python /path/to/scrapemp3s.py http://example.com/music.php
Twitter Favorites Bankruptcy
Update June 2013: This script no longer works and cannot be made to work easily. It uses basic password authentication, while Twitter now requires all write APIs to use token-exchange, which is far more complex to implement. This post is kept around for historical reasons only. No, I don’t know of another way to delete all of your old favorites. In fact, I’ve had a change of heart since writing this script – I no longer want to treat my old twitter favorites as a sort of “inbox” that needs emptying. They’re more like Facebook “Likes” – you wouldn’t go back and try and unlike everything you’ve ever liked, would you? My advice: Just leave them alone. They’re not hurting anything.
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I read Twitter primarily on the iPhone, and find tons of great links I want to read in a proper browser later on (I personally find reading most web sites on an iPhone to be more hassle than it’s worth). Perfect solution: Side-swipe an item in Tweetie and tap the star icon to mark it as a favorite. Later, visit the Favorites section at twitter.com to follow up.
Unfortunately, over the past couple of years I’ve favorited way more things than I’ll ever have time to read. As of now, I’ve got 1600 favorites waiting to be read. Ain’t never gonna happen. I declare Twitter Favorite bankruptcy! Needed a way to batch-unfavorite the whole collection, and twitter.com doesn’t provide a tool for that. Time to dive into the Twitter API. Read More →
django-treedata: A web app for municipal tree tracking
Recently I was invited to participate in the California Data Camp and DataSF App Contest hosted by California Watch and spot.us. The unconference would feature lots of discussion about making use of publicly available data sets to improve quality of life. The App Contest challenged developers to choose one of the many data sets available at DataSF.org and build something cool with it in a relatively short period of time. Here’s a showcase of existing apps built on those data sets.
The Knight Digital Media Center (where I work) invited me to take part, and I chose a database of 64,000 San Francisco trees and plants. The goal of the project was to:
- Make it easy for citizens to explore and discover the huge number of plant species and individual trees maintained by the city
- Make it easy for citizens to “flag” a tree as needing maintenance, water, food, etc.
- Make it easy for citizens to request a tree at a particular location
- Provide data visualization tools to let citizens explore and understand the plant variety visually
- Make it easy to see what a given species will look like in 5,10,15,20 years when requesting a tree
- Ideally, a future version of the app would include ecology data on all species, listing the water consumption and carbon offset of each
I decided to build the project on Django, of course. Put a total of around 15 hours into the project, about half of which was spent massaging and cleaning the provided data, which had multiple pieces of information stuffed into single fields, non-standard date formats, and was completely non-relational. Cities implementing django-treedata “fresh,” without having to be compatible with an existing data entry system, won’t have to worry about data conversion/format issues.
Once the data was clean, the rest was pretty straightforward Django stuff. The one non-standard aspect is the external “lastcount” script, which counts the number of instances of each species and stores the result on a field in the Species model. Doing this in real time for such a large number of trees turned out to be very computationally expensive, so the script needs to be run from a crontab periodically.
Because dev time was so limited, all of it went into data cleaning and building out the models and views. We’ve put ZERO work into design considerations, so please don’t crucify us for that. The CSS is built on top of the excellent 960 Grid framework, so layout will be easy. Some of the data visualization is done via the excellent Google Charts API.
Much to our surprise, the django-treedata app won the competition!
Please note that the project has only been run in a development environment and has never been publicly deployed – the project as it stands should be considred a starting point for cities to built on. The readme explains more. The project is completely open source and is released under the very liberal BSD license – do with it as you will.
Thanks also to J-School webmaster for Chuck Harris for his contributions to the project
Populate Mailman Lists from Django Projects
Django projects can end up with complex sets of Users, Groups, and multiple profile types representing different types of people. For example a school site might have Students, Parents, Teachers, Staff, and Alumni. The mailing lists for that school will live completely outside of the Django project, but there’s a good chance you’d like to be able to populate list membership from your membership database rather than maintaining lists by hand. And you’d like to be able to use any combination of criteria to populate your lists (Group membership, profile types, join date, privileges, etc.)
Since Mailman is installed on so many web hosts by default, there’s a good chance you’re using it, and have lots of overlapping and non-overlapping groups subscribed to various lists. I recently went through the process of integrating a bunch of Mailman lists with the membership representing a school intranet built in Django and thought I’d document it for anyone going through a similar process.
Once everything is set up, you’ll never need to use the Mailman interface to manage lists again – everything will be automated and self-maintaining.
Read More →
Django-Todo
Update, April 2018: django-todo has been updated to version 2.0, with its first running test suite, live demo site, and full support for Django 2 / Python 3. Please see http://django-todo.org/.
django-todo is a multi-user, multi-group task management and assignment system for the Django web application framework.
Designed as a “pluggable” application ready to import into existing Django projects.
You must already have a login/authorization system installed and working in your project before installing django-todo.
django-todo supports drag and drop task prioritization, email notification to task assignees, search, and lots more. Feedback welcome.
The code is hosted on GitHub and can be downloaded or checked out via git. The package also includes a setup.py, and can be installed with pip.