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(Cue impending doom music)

I got a call yesterday from someone answering a job application I’d posted.  He told me he’s been trying to call all week, but that he kept intermittently getting “this number is not in service.”  He said out of 8 calls, he connected twice.  Ouch!

So, Google Voice is OUT

Searching for a Virtual PBX isn’t easy.  I spent hours looking at review sites (which mostly have outdated information), and finally bit the bullet and signed up with eVoice

So far, I am extremely impressed.  Let me tell you why I chose eVoice, and why I am more impressed than I thought I’d be.  I actually think they are underselling their service …

Why I chose eVoice over RingCentral and Google Voice

First off, I had to through Google Voice out of the running right away due to the inability to reliably answer the phone. Also because their system always requires me to hit “1″ to answer the call. I hate that, because I am usually on the cell phone, and it is a hassle to unlock the dialpad to hit “1″, so callers have often dropped before I can do it.

The base feature set of RingCentral and eVoice are very similar. If I had an iPhone, I might have gone with RingCentral because of the nice app to manage and access their voicemail.

There are tons of features in eVoice, the main ones for me are:

• Voicemail to text – this is the big one for me.  I hate voicemail because of the interruption.  But reading a transcription is so much faster and easier.  Here’s where eVoice actually undersells themselves.  They will not only send the transcription to (multiple) email addresses for you, they’ll also send it via text message!  That’s the fastest, easiest way for me.  A winning feature all by itself.
• Optional “auto receptionist”.  For now, I only have one extension, so it would be ridiculous to make people listen to a message and then hit “1″, the only extension, to contact me.  eVoice, unlike many Hosted PBX systems, allows me to just send the message along without the interruption.  But later, if I add more extensions I can enable the receptionist.  That’s user friendly, and bodes well for the service.
• 6 Month Free Trial.  Wow, that’s a nice free trial period.  If they don’t pan out, I am only out the cost of a new run of business cards.

Technorati Tags: hosted pbx, pbx, virtual pbx, virtual phone number

What I did was to develop using a local address of “blogs.dev” as my base site, and then add all the other sites using the WPMU features.  So I had coderseye.blogs.dev and ecomsmith.blogs.dev as well.

All was great, until it came time to make the sites live.  I did what I used to do.  I dumped all my data from the database, opened it in an editor, and replaced “blogs.dev” with the live domain name that is acting as the master control for this site.

It worked!  Sort of.  It showed my blogs, but I couldn’t login.  WordPress kept complaining about needing cookies enabled.  But … but … they are enabled!

Fixing it took a bit of trial and error.The critical change I needed to make was to edit my wp-config.php file and change the line:

define( 'DOMAIN_CURRENT_SITE', 'blogs.dev' );

All I had to do was to update it with the new, live, master control site domain name.  That way WP knows which domain to set the cookie for.

It works, and it only cost me about 45 minutes of panicked searching, glad to share.

Technorati Tags: Wordpress, wpmu

It turns out that many sites on Bluehost got hacked last week by someone installing malware which somehow involves “www.domainameat.cc”. It is easy enough to see if you are hacked. FTP a PHP file from your site and look at it. Does it start with “base64_decode” followed by a bunch of gobbledygook? If so, yep, you are hacked.

Here’s what I did to fix it, it took about 10 minutes:

• Delete everything in the “public_html/.files” directory.  That’s a bunch of spam.
• Delete every php file on the server
• Upload all of them again, you do use version control, right?

Alternatively, you could try using the script from this site, which explains what is going on.

If you have a business site and use my support service, I’d already be doing this for you.  You would already have backups, and you would have version control. This would just be a blip on your day, followed by an email from us explaining what we did to recover.

The internet was no help. Lots of people were suggesting using a “dyamic_widget_params” filter. Nope, that isn’t what I want. I don’t want to modify before and after the title, I want to actually change the title.

But, with some poking around, I figured it out. It’s actually pretty easy.

The trick is to use the ‘widget_title’ filter, and the ‘link_category’ filter. Both of these pass the title itself to your function.

Here’s my code, fix the path for your theme and put in the theme’s functions.php file:

/**
 * Show a graphic title if one matches
 */
function fancy_title($title) {
 $clean = strtolower(str_replace(' ', '_', $title));
 $fpath= '/wp-content/themes/YOUR-THEME/images/'.$clean.'.jpg';
 if (file_exists(getcwd() . $fpath)) {
   return "<img src='$fpath' alt='$title' />";
 }
 return $title;
}

add_filter('widget_title', fancy_title);
add_filter('link_category', fancy_title);

Technorati Tags: functions, Wordpress

Ouch! That meant that I couldn’t update any of my sites without updating all of them, or at least retesting all of them.

This article will explain how I sandboxed my Django sites, so that all of them have their own versions of the appropriate library, and how I have them all running on the new production server.

The Tools

• Lighttpd – I am convinced that Lighty is the easiest, fastest (or close enough not to matter), most reliable way to serve Django. Whenever possible, I use it for my own sites and for clients. I am not an Apache fan, I find it bloated, opaque, hard to debug and hard to configure.
• Supervisor – A fantastic, easily configured Daemon starter and monitor for Linux. It doesn’t replace the normal /etc/init.d/ system on Linux, instead it supplements it with the ability to run certain things – in this case my Django servers – very easily. It automatically restarts failed processes, monitors uptime, and is generally my favorite new find in sysadmin world.
• Superlance – A plugin for Supervisor that does HTTP web “pings”, emails on failure and restarts the failed process.
• Virtualenv – The tool that does the actual creation of the sandboxes. Absolutely invaluable.

Setting up your VirtualEnvironments

There are plenty of good tutorials about using virtualenv. SaltyCrane has a particularly good one with links to his sources.

I set it up pretty much as he describes, with the exception that any packages that I’m going to use from source (including the site itself) get put in a “src” directory at the root of the virtual environment.

I then symlink src/site-i-am-working-on to the root as well. Makes it easier to get to work on the site, but keeps everything in the same logical places.

Lastly, I create a file called “production”, in the bin directory. It is just a shell script that gives details about how to run this particular environment in production. Here’s an example:

SLUG=invisible
PID_FILE=/var/venv/$SLUG/$SLUG.pid
HOST=127.0.0.1
PORT=16667
MANAGE_COMMAND="runfcgi host=$HOST port=$PORT pidfile=$PID_FILE daemonize=false maxchildren=10  maxspare=5 minspare=2 method=threaded outlog=/var/venv/$SLUG/logs/${SLUG}.stdout errlog=/var/venv/$SLUG/logs/${SLUG}.stderr"

This shell script is going to be used by a convenient little script named “start_venv.sh” to make the fastcgi process start inside its virtual environment. That file is included in my example supervisor.tgz archive.

#! /bin/sh
set -e

if [ -z $1 ]
then
  echo "USAGE: start_venv.sh venv [workdir]"
  exit 2
fi

VENV=/var/venv/$1

if [ -z $2 ]
then
  STARTDIR=$VENV/$1
else
  STARTDIR=$VENV/$2
fi

if [ ! -f $VENV/bin/production ]
then
  echo "Could not find $VENV/bin/production"
  exit 2
fi

source $VENV/bin/activate
cd $STARTDIR
source $VENV/bin/production
python manage.py $MANAGE_COMMAND

You’ll have to adjust a path or two to your preference. I put everything in /var/venv/[project], and I almost always arrange things so that the project itself is named the same, at the root of the virtual environment. For example, “invisible castle” is at /var/venv/invisible/invisible. That way, I can start the app with a simple “start_venv.sh invisible”

Setting up Supervisor

A simple “pip install superlance” should do the trick. It will install both Supervisor and the Superlance plugin.

I’m including my init script for supervisor in my example supervisor.tgz archive. It is Debian specific, modify to your needs on a RedHat system.

Configuring Supervisor to start and monitor your sites is remarkably simple and short. Here are the key lines from my supervisord.conf file:

[program:invisible]
command=/usr/bin/pidproxy /var/venv/invisible/invisible.pid /var/venv/start_venv.sh invisible
autostart=true
autorestart=true
startsecs=10

[eventlistener:invisible_httpok]
command=python -u /usr/bin/httpok -p invisible -m myaddress@example.com http://invisiblecastle.com/statusping/
events=TICK_60

The first starts invisible castle, the second runs an HTTP check every 60 seconds, emailing me and restarting if it didn’t work.

For the “statusping”, I just use the simplest thing possible, a “direct to template” entry in my urls.

urlpatterns += patterns('django.views.generic.simple',
 (r'^statusping/$', 'direct_to_template', {'template': 'statusping.html'})

My “statusping.html” file simply contains the word “OK”, it doesn’t extend any base templates, it just says “OK” when hit. Easy, low resource use.

After supervisor is set up, you can control it by simply typing “supervisorctl”, which will show you a list of all monitored processes and their uptime. Start, stop or restart by typing for example “restart invisible”, you get the idea. It could hardly be easier, and you can make supervisorctl available to non-root users, which is very nice.

Setting up Lighttpd

Here’s an example section from my lighttpd.conf file:

fastcgi.server = (
  "/invisible.fcgi" =>
  ((
      "check-local" => "disable",
      "host" => "127.0.0.1",
      "port" => 16667,
      "min-proces" => 4,
      "max-load-per-proc" => 3,
  )),
  # more .fcgi definitions here
)

# redirect www hits
$HTTP["host"] =~ "www\.invisiblecastle\.com(.*)" {
	url.redirect = ( "^/(.*)" => "http://invisiblecastle.com/$1" )
}

$HTTP["host"] == "invisiblecastle.com" {
    alias.url = (
       "/media/" => "/var/venv/invisible/lib/src/django/contrib/admin/media/",
       "/static/" => "/var/venv/invisible/lib/src/invisible/static/",
    )

    url.rewrite-once = (
        "^(/media.*)$" => "$1",
        "^(/static.*)$" => "$1",
        "^/favicon\.ico$" => "/static/favicon.ico",
        "^(/.*)$" => "/invisible.fcgi$1",
    )

    server.errorlog = "/var/venv/invisible/logs/invisible.error.log"
    accesslog.filename = "/var/venv/invisible/logs/invisible.access.log"
}

Technorati Tags: Django, Lighttpd, supervisord, virtualenv

One of my big goals was to completely drop Apache.  I just don’t like that server.  Ugly to configure, huge, slow & bloated.  I much prefer Lighttpd for my Django & Satchmo projects, but I hadn’t ever tried using it for PHP.  Today I bit the bullet and started the transition.

A few details before I get into how I’ve got the blog configured.  My VPS “Slice” is running Debian.  This is hands-down, my favorite Linux distribution.  I can’t stand RedHat VPS system, to be honest.  RPM hell, upgrade hell, cpanel.  Ugh.

Debian is so much more simple and clean.  No RPM hell, easy upgrades.  Do yourself a favor and give it a try.

Getting the site up and running on Debian was almost dead simple.  Just one tricky bit at the end.

First, I installed lighttpd, php5 (cgi) and mysql with “aptitude install lighttpd lighttpd-mod-magnet mysql-server”

Note: I installed a bunch of other php5 packages too, like php5-curl, php-pear, php5-mysql.  That’s going to be up to your needs.  Just run Aptitude and search for php5, cursor up and down with arrows and press “+” to tell it you want to install a package, press ‘g’ to go ahead and install what you’ve just selected.

Now for the tricky bit.  Making WordPress work with Lighty.  You’ve already got mod_magnet installed.  Refer to this blog entry for help doing that.

Bingo bango, WordPress is moved over cleanly from my old host.  No annoying old Apache, it is fast, and has nearly no overhead.

[tags]lighttpd,wordpress,debian[/tags]

I’ll be using Satchmo as an example of how to create very useful custom signals to allow for some quite complex customizations. If you want a copy of the presentation, please sign up below and I’ll send it after the convention.

Last year at DjangoCon, one of the most interesting sessions was the one where people presented their “pony requests”, and made a case for their pet feature to be built into Django.

Shortly after that, the first logos for the Django Pony began to appear, followed by the inevitable (in retrospect) djangopony.com.

This morning, I discovered that NASA uses Django and even has a Django Pony page.

Fly, little pony, spread your meme wide!

[tags]django pony, django, djangocon[/tags]

Top 5 most used Web Applications

Gmail – I have about twenty email addresses, all forwarding to my main Gmail account. I use it for three main reasons.

1. Synchronization. The account is always in sync even when accessing it from different computers
2. Phone access. It is built-in to my T-Mobile G1 (Googlephone) phone.
3. Spam. I have had some of these addresses for almost twenty years. That adds up to a metric ton of spam. To be specific, I get about 3,200 spam messages a day, which works out to a little over two per minute. I used to run spam-filtering programs on my Mac, but Google is far far better at it. I get possibly one or two missed spams a day in my inbox. Amazing.

Freshbooks – I use Freshbooks to track time for clients, to provide trouble-ticket handling for them, and to generate invoices for hourly clients. It lets my employees log time to their assigned projects. It even has an OSX dashboard widget allowing me to punch-in/punch-out on projects as I work them. Simply beautiful, and extremely cheap, even free if you are just tracking a few projects.

Assembla – I use Assembla to manage version control, tickets, feature requests, and associated Wiki pages for my clients. They support Mercurial, SVN, and Git, which makes my life much easier. Not only that, but using them I have a dashboard showing the latest tickets from all clients, all in one place. Very cost-effective, much better than trying to “roll my own” on my own server.

Google Calendar – I love being able to share my calendars easily with friends. I have a “family/kids” calendar shared with my ex-wife where we plan out our visitation, holidays and the like. I share that (read-only) with my girlfriend, and I can also see her schedule. It works extremely well, especially since it is integrated with my phone. My only tip here is that you absolutely must only use one calendar. You cannot succeed if you use one calendar for this, another for that. One must rule them all.

HabitCal – This is an odd one, it is a tool I use to track the development of habits. Using it, I can mark each day as a success, fail, or exempt for each of the habits I am developing. It is simple, but quite valuable to me.

[tags]webapps,reviews[/tags]