Technology Blog

I recently visited the website random.org, which is a free/fee-based generator of random numbers.  It's been around for a long time - since 1998.  It made me revisit the concept of randomness and how oddly hard it is to achieve. Why is randomness important? It's amazing how many things rely…

Would you like to pull in the header and/or footer from a related but separate website for use on your own pages? Here's how.

The marketing software company HubSpot offers a nifty feature called "custom CRM cards."  The idea is that a HubSpot dashboard can send a GET request to an API that you maintain, retrieve some JSON-formatted information and render it in some "cards" alongside other data.  One of our clients wished to use…

One of the biggest issues with Python (our preferred development language) is dependency management.  Any individual deployment can result in minor differences in the versions of the files and libraries which make up the application.  And these minor variations introduce uncertainty and randomness into our deployment process. So, we've investigated…

A new study accepted for publication in the British Journal of General Practice asserts that the majority of general practice websites contain content well above the recommended reading level for online content. The study analyzed 3,823 pages of content scraped from 813 Scottish general practice websites.  Analysis showed that 2,942 pages…

Whenever I go to a website, my eyes go immediately to the year. You'd be surprised how many websites say 2006 or 2002 or even 1999. At best, is demonstrates no attention to details and at worst it proclaims the site as abandoned. At Imaginary, we have our site and...

Companion code for this post: https://github.com/ImaginaryLandscape/deprecate_cmsplugin_filer If you've been building projects using django CMS for any length of time, chances are you're familiar with Divio's cmsplugin-filer application which provided image, link, file, folder and video plugins for interacting with django-filer. And if you're here, chances are you're aware that cmsplugin-filer has now...

Through the use of the Poetry project, incremental changes, and a little luck, the Django 1.11 -> 2.2 and django CMS 3.4 -> 3.7 upgrade was a success, but not without some excessively harsh profanity.

The ability to bypass multifactor authentication can be useful in certain use cases.

Imaginary has implemented two high tech tools to foster a decidedly low tech essential for success - frequent and productive client collaboration.

The recent spike in usage of the term covid-19 introduced some inconsistent results in Imaginary’s custom site search engine, iScraper, a tool which utilizes Elasticsearch as its indexing engine.  We’ll take a closer look at these results and show how we corrected the problem with an Elasticsearch configuration change. iScraper...

Over the years I've become increasingly wary of the word "easy" in software documentation. Pick a software project at random, and there's a good chance the documentation will lead off with something like "Booloogent makes the process of frobnifying your wakalixes easy!" And then you try to use the package...

2019 was an interesting year in website accessibility.  The simple and elegant premise of accessibility has been pushed aside by aggressive law firms, miserly corporations and apathetic regulatory agencies. In October the Supreme Court decided not to hear the appeal of Guillermo Robles v. Domino’s Pizza LLC.  The background is...

Introduction Most online forms fit on a single page.  Think of a "join our forum" or "contact us" form into which the user enters a name, email address, and maybe a few other pieces of information.  If you're building this kind of functionality into a Django site, you can take...

The Django shell provides an environment where developers can interact with the database via Django's ORM. While the shell is great for basic interactions, it quickly becomes laborious to work in, be it due to manual imports, having to scroll through shell history to repeat commands, or working with / viewing queries returning more than, say, 20 records. These issues, and more, can be remedied by interacting with the ORM in Jupyter notebooks, using Pandas.

In the world of web development, particularly open source web development, there are two fundamental requirements that you should ask of any new web development vendor – code isolation and server isolation.  Whenever possible, you must insist that the underlying code that runs your website is isolated and under your...

In Part 1 of this post, I described the trials, tribulations and ultimate success of running Ansible to provision a cloud server, which we do often here at Imaginary Landscape.  Part 2 concludes the post by describing the process for getting uWSGI working with NGINX and Django. When I first tested the...

Here at Imaginary Landscape, we are frequently tasked with spinning up new cloud servers for our clients.  Once a new server is online, we usually follow up by provisioning it with useful software.  To automate that process, we began using Ansible a few years ago, and have had a lot...

Modern websites are complicated pieces of machinery. The requests they initiate can be intensive and take more time to complete than a typical HTTP request-response cycle. This is typically refererd to as a blocking request, in that the browser (and user) waits until the response is received. If the request...

In February 2017, Google announced its plans to discontinue its Google Site Search product. Those clients of Imaginary Landscape who had relied on Google to provide their users with a search engine service for their website looked to us for a new solution. Finding no obvious equivalent replacement, we decided to create our own website scraper and accompanying search app.

Django Web Development, Django Web Framework, Integration and Deployment with Drone, Docker, Django, Gunicorn and Nginx

It boils down to this. An upgrade costs money, sometimes a lot of money, but the result has no visible outcome. In fact, in many cases the only outcome is an assurance that you've reduced the probability of attack, intrusion, breach and related unpleasantness. By any measure, that's a tough...

You may have have heard of Letsencrypt, which is a new SSL certificate authority that provides free SSL certificates that are supported in all modern browsers. This service is also designed to help automate the issuance of SSL certificates.  The following describes how to use Letsencrypt to configure auto-renewing SSL certificates...

Imaginary Landscape Ranked Among the Top Five Web Developers in Chicago and Among the Top Python and Django Web Developers Worldwide.

Independent OWASP Top 10 Security Risk Audit for Python-based Websites.