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Technology Blog

Upgrading Django with AI

Django 3.2 reaches its end of life in April 2024.  We've been busy upgrading all of our sites to Django 4.2, the current LTS.  As part of this upgrade cycle, we've begun leaning on artificial intelligence tools to see if we could decrease the time it takes for the upgrade.  Happy to report we've seen a significant time savings.

The importance of randomness in online security

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…

Implementing dependency management with Python Poetry

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…

Healthcare content too complex, a study

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…

Migrate Away from cmsplugin-filer in a Few Easy Steps

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...

Tuning Site Search for Covid-19

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...

Website Search using Django and PostgreSQL Trigrams

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...

The absurdity of the fight against accessible websites

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...