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It’s a while since I have written here: too much work for sure, but also I think I am pretty lazy and writing in English takes a lot of effort for me.

Today I am writing after I had to migrate my website: my old provider (unbit.it, yes, the one behind UWSGI) decided to not provide services to consumers but to focus to B2B (I guess).

I loved the old provider: it was pretty expensive but I NEVER had downtime. Well… there might have been but I never noticed considering the low traffic.
Also they are really competent.

Anyway I had to migrate anyway (deadline was end on January 2018) so I found a new provider (keliweb.it) and I transferred the domain.

Everything went almost smoothly (damn DNS) until I tried to migrate this website and upgrade it.

Even if migrating the MySQL database and the WordPress code has been pretty easy, I realized that years of upgrades had messed up quite a bit with the previous installation, so I decided to do a fresh re-install.

At this point I found my new installation having troubles: a weird error was coming out every time I was installing plugins or themes.
The error was particularly weird because the actual JSON response contained the message state=”success” and the installations were actually successful.

Digging around I found out that a plugin was messing with the responses adding content before the headers were sent (yes, PHP ??‍♂️).
Deactivated the plugin (fortunately it was a code formatter one) everything worked fine.

Anyway, I think the lesson from this is that every time you touch something old, you need to expect troubles.

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Since it took quite a bit of time for me to figure out the solution to this problem, I decided to write a quick reminder here.

I was working on a web application written in Bottle.py and everything was going smoothly until I decided to debug a function using the PyDev debugger in Eclipse.

Long story short there was no way to make the debugger work even if the same debugger was working perfectly fine in the unit tests.

After several tests I was able to understand that the PyDev debugger is incompatible with the option “reloader=True” of the bottle app.

So you can run your app in this way:

application.run(
    host=your_host,
    port=your_port,
    debug=True,
    reloader=True
)

and it is wonderful because the app will reload by itself every time you change a python file,

but if you want to run the code in the PyDev debugger you need to start your app in this way:

application.run(
    host=your_host,
    port=your_port,
    debug=True
)

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It’s a while since I begun my online course! Actually in 3 weeks I’m done!

How is going? Great! I know I don’t know everything about web programming, but this course is really opening my mind!

The great part is that even if it should be dedicated to mobile, there are so many good advices for general web developing that it will be worth even if I’ll never develop anything for the cellphones!

I think I’ll collect some good link and I’ll post them at the end of the course!

Be tuned!

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Is talking about WordPress inside a WordPress website “meta-talking”?

No, the point of this post is not answer the previous question…. that one just came out because I just finished to submit my first WordPress plugin in their website and right now I’m pretty tired!

The plugin I wrote is for the service I work for (ADS http://adsabs.harvard.edu ) and probably will be useful for few people only!

But who cares! It has been a wonderful experience and I learned how to write these kind of small web applications: I’m extremely satisfied!

Anyway, if you want to give a look you can read something more HERE.

 

BTW… I’m still thinking that  talking about WordPress inside a WordPress website is “meta-talking” 🙂

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Did you see the new interface of Facebook?

Ok… I have to be more specific 🙂 : did you see the new interface that Facebook released few days ago (September 21 2011)?

New features, new filters, new cool stuff! Moreover I just read that they are going to introduce a new interface for the user page.

The problem? I don’t want them because I don’t need them! 

Now, as a computer scientist I understand the need of improving a service. I also understand that there is a competition between Facebook, Google+ and Twitter and that Facebook and Google+ are copying each other.

What I really don’t understand is: why don’t they hire some experts in usability?  

My question comes from the fact that every new feature they introduce in Facebook is against any concept of good usability about interfaces! Now they want their users to learn how to use their service, and I’m fine with that (even if I have some different point of view), but they cannot change completely in one day the way the users have to do the same basic things! 

An example? If I’m used to have the list of the posts in chronological order (most recent first), it’s ok to introduce new filters and new ways to view the same posts, but WHY THERE IS NOT “View the posts in chronological order” any more?

So my only complain is: why cannot I give up on the new stuff and have my old simple functional interface?