Tracking Memory Consumption

I wanted a way to track the memory used by the Django applications on my WebFaction account so I could get a better sense of the memory consumption over time as well as the peaks and valleys for the applications. I have a shell script in place that sums up the current memory usage for the command prompt so I can log into the server and check the current usage but nothing was setup for logging that number or plotting it on a graph. This is the solution I came up with to measure, log and display the memory usage over a twenty four hour period.

CouchDB and WSGI

via Mikeal Rogers (http://www.mikealrogers.com/) Django Application Example: #!/usr/bin/python import os, sys import couchdb_wsgi django_project = os.path.join(os.path.dirname(__file__), 'mysite') sys.path.append(django_project) os.environ['DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE'] = 'mysite.settings' import django.core.handlers.wsgi application = django.core.handlers.wsgi.WSGIHandler() couchdb_wsgi.CouchDBWSGIHandler(application).run() All the code is up on github and [he's] written up some solid Sphinx docs that are up on gh-pages. [He's] also pushed an initial release to PyPI.

Automatic Thumbnail Image Creation for Django

Django comes with a lot of batteries included in the core code including an admin interface that is incredibly easy to use as well as being easily extensible. One of the missing batteries is a method to automatically create thumbnail images for media being uploaded through the application. This is my current solution for the thumbnail creation which I use on a couple of sites. This allows me to upload an image with or without a thumbnail file and have the system create a thumbnail when needed.

Installing Django for Leopard with MySQL Support

I was following along with the instructions from Chapter 2 of the Django Book, an online reference for learning and using Django a Python web framework when I hit a small snag in adding a database for my project. My initial experience with Mac OS X Leopard (10.5) and adding open-source software has been a pleasure.