I always use django-ckeditor in my web site projects when I need an html editor. CKEditor is a nice tool, highly customizable, which produces a well formatted html. Here at Otto srl there was the need to include custom app's contents inside the editor in an easy way, since the tool has to be used by unexperienced people.

I approached these requirements developing a custom CKEditor plugin, which can communicate with django apps async through ajax requests. Every app can ...

read the full post

This was the first time I had to manage serious translations for a react-redux project. I use to develop my applications starting from the awesome react-redux-starter-key by davezuko.

This starter kit doesn't include i18n support out of the box, so some work is needed. I followed this article from freecodcamp and changed things a bit, so let's start.

Install react-intl

It seems that in the react world there is one library to choose for internationalization: react-intl by yahoo.

Let's install ...

read the full post

I was a happy developer using django-suit for all my working projects. Now django-suit v1 is becoming a bit oldie, it is based on bootstrap 2.3, and rewrites so many templates that its compatibility with some other apps begins to suffer (i.e. django-filer). It's a shame, it was in my opinion the best admin app overthere.

I know django-suit v2 is on stage, at the moment of this writing it is in development, and I'm quite sure it'will ...

read the full post

I just finished to setup ssl encryption for abidibo.net, using Let's Encrypt Certificate Authority. This post serves as a reminder for me, and maybe a sort of guide for you.

This post assumes the website runs with the following technologies:

• django >= 1.8
• nginx
• debian 8 (jessie) with ssh access

Why Let's Encrypt?

Let's Encrypt is a free, automated, and open certificate authority (CA), run for the public’s benefit. It is a service provided by the Internet Security ...

read the full post

Years ago' I developed a php class to create image thumbnails on the fly, evaluating the interesting part of the image. I wrote about this in my company's blog, now I'd like to share these concepts here, in my poor english.

Why, what?

Generate thumbnails from images is a common task in modern web applications, because there is no reason to serve oversized images, when they are used as 800px wide (or less) images in a template. There is no reason to make a user download the whole image (many KB or MB), if then it is resized through css.

But how to deal with thumbnails?
There are two main approaches used by modern web applications:

1. have the backend generate ...

read the full post

Boostrap progress bar is a nice component that comes in handy when loading async contents, large images or, for example, when rendering a complex google map.

But as is, it is quite useless if you want to implement a dynamic loader, which progress value changes over time. There are two major problems:

1. when updating the value there is no animation, but just a jump to the new provided value;
2. if the value updates are set immediately one after another, you ...

read the full post

Everyone is hot for functional programming in the js world. With the explosion of React, Cycle.js, RxJs and friends, it seems convenient to abandon imperative programming in favour of functional (declarative) programming, at least when dealing with these new ...

read the full post

Recently I began my trip in the world of react and redux. Everyone is hot with these "new" technologies, and after my previous experiences with angular I decided to give it a try.

In this entry I just want to share a tip about how to set the value of a material-ui TextField for testing purposes.

Scenario

I have a simple login form, with username and password fields, and a submit button. When the submit button is clicked, a function ...

read the full post

I'm currently re-configuring all my vim stuff, operation which I perform every x months/years. I used to debug django application using pdb and its set_trace method, this time I decided to integrate a debugging tool inside vim as I always did for PHP using xdebug.

I decided (after some other attempts), to use vdebug, which (as described in the ...

read the full post

Recently I installed qpaeq as a system wide mixer on my ubuntu 14.04 machine. Now I want a way to launch it from the status bar, so I began looking for a way to create a simple gnome-extension. Lucky me, the extensions are written in js, unfortunately the documentation is not so good.

A good starting point is this excellent post (a bit outdated, not all scripts presented work).

Let's proceed by steps.

Create a boilerplate project

We can ...

read the full post