Building custom template tags in Jinja2 is not an easy task. That used to be the case, which you will see below.

tl;dr: Give jinja2-simple-tags a try.

Why would you create a custom template tag?

From the docs:

By writing extensions you can add custom tags to Jinja. This …

Real-time form validation with Flask-Meld  

Flask-Meld now integrates with Flask-WTF to handle form validation.

What's the big deal? Real-time form validation without writing any Javascript!

Of course I wouldn't leave you hanging without a way to try it yourself! Here's a link to the demo

Building your form

While you …

Now that Flask-Meld is working, it's time to start getting things ready for production. I've been wanting to start developing Meld components for Conveyor. Flask-Meld utilizes WebSockets, which Conveyor does not currently support. To make all of the magic happen NGINX and uWSGI configurations will need to be updated to …

Introducing a new way to build web applications: Flask-Meld  

Try the demo yourself

Before we dive in, I would like to give credit where credit is due. This extension was heavily inspired by the following projects and people:

• Phoenix LiveView the original inspiration!
• @calebporzio for his work on Laravel Livewire …

After switching from Gmail to self-hosted email, managing the inbox has become more difficult. Making the switch made me realize something; I miss some of the features from Gmail. On my search for an alternative email client, I have seen RoundCube suggested as a web-based, open-source alternative. I started using …

In the last article we learned how to set up and use a Digital Ocean Oauth app. Now that we understand how that works, let's make all of that hard work more accessible to the rest of the Flask community. Flask-Dance is an extension that is used to complete the …

The OAuth flow can be confusing the first time you do it. This article and example project should help you feel more comfortable specifically for people who would like to use OAuth with Digital Ocean.

The code for this application can be found at https://github.com/mikeabrahamsen/flask-digitalocean-oauth-example

Conveyor …

If you are deploying many virtual machines, templates can be leveraged to save time and even storage if using thin provisioning.

The process of creating a template is two steps:

1. Create and configure the base operating system image
2. Use sysprep to remove system-specific settings

Once completed we can create virtual …

My first introduction to Flask was Miguel Grinberg's original Flask Megatutorial. After using Django as my framework of choice for several years. Miguel's simple use of Flask allowed me to see just far enough under the hood that I started understanding much more of the web stack, hidden in some …

One of the benefits of using Flask is it is straightforward to get an application up and running. When you are first starting, you can create your application with a single file. The structure of the application is left entirely up to the developer.

Starting with a single file application …

ZFS is both a filesystem and a volume manager. If you have extra RAM in your system it will increase the read speed of your system dramatically by caching the system's most-used files in RAM.

How to use ZFS:

1. The easiest way to use ZFS with Arch Linux is to …

If you are a full-stack developer, whether you like it or not, you are going to use Javascript. It's an incredible language that allows developers to create dynamic applications. The amount of Javascript you use is up to you. Javascript can be used to power an entire application or it …

The easiest solution to add flags to your Brave Browser startup is to use the brave AUR package. It has a brave-launcher script that will check for a .config/brave-flags.conf file. All you need to do is create and populate the .config/brave-flags.conf

Alternative if using the brave-bin …

One of my servers had a failure over the weekend and caused some corruption of the boot loader. This is the first time I have experienced this with a setup built on LVM and LUKS, which provided a little extra complexity to solve the problem.

This time, the Ubuntu Boot …

Small UI updates today

Added a card to show additional information:

Just for convenience a link was added to get from the register screen to the login page.

Wrote a regex in vim today that used a grouping in the find and replace. Needed to update 936 instances..

From a statement that calls a custom module function {% if entry.getEnableVal('conveyorDevToggle') == 1 to be a simple statement.. {% if entry.conveyorDevToggle %}

This is the regex used: :%s/\ventry.getEnableVal …

In this iteration a few small changes are going to be made. Here is the current state of the Conveyor registration page:

Here it is after the following changes:

• The width of the form imports are too long
• Add a referral code input
• Make the submit button smaller
• Right align …

When trying to implement Recaptcha2 Invisible with Flask-WTF I ran into the following error:

Uncaught (in promise) null

This seemed to be a pretty obscure problem as I could not get any additional information from the application about what was going wrong. What finally got me to the solution was …

newgrp is a convienient command I ran across today. You can run this command after you add your user to a group. This allows you to continue without having to logout and log back in for the group changes to take effect.

Here is the man page:

 Manual page newgrp …

Finished documentation for a client website. Remove database backups that are more than 30 days old

Otherwise a server maintenance day:

• Cleaned internals of home server
• Ran RAM test as I have had some crashes a couple times
• Loosened the CPU heatsync screws a half turn each. There are reports …

After setting up an account with Matomo you can add the following to your peliconconf.py file.

# pelicanconf.py
MATOMO_SITE_ID = 2
MATOMO_URL = "ma.matomo.cloud"

Here is a great little bash command to remove all of the spaces of a filename and replace them with an underscore for all files in the current directory.

for f in *\ *; do mv "$f" "${f// /_}"; done

This also applies to 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, and 2008 models.

With 152k miles it was finally starting to feel time to replace the suspension in The Rolla. Replacing the struts in a 2005 Corolla is a fairly easy task.
I was planning 4 hours just to replace the back …

Spent some time today working with Github actions for the first time. I set up a workflow that allowed me to lint the repo and run the tests on push.

Of course, this meant running my tests for the first time in a different environment and there was 37 tests …

Today I was filling out a survey for a product I signed up for Python Morsels to help continue my Python education and one of the questions was:

If you could wave a magic wand (written in Python) and I could grant a wish, what would suddenly be different for …

Currently Conveyor will install Python 3.6 when you create a server as 3.6 is the version that is used with Ubuntu 18. However, it would be great to have the ability to install more recent versions of Python and be able to use different versions depending on the …

When refactoring the new flow for creating a site the + New Site button was removed so there was only one option to add a site. If you already have a site with Conveyor we need to make sure the add site button is available.

To start I have written two …

While this is not supported with all Markdown interpreters, the following will work with Pelican and many others. You can add {:target="_blank"} following the Markdown link.

[Conveyor](www.conveyor.dev){:target="_blank"}

Here is an example, this link will open in a new tab: Conveyor

If you want to get the list of repos (or any other resource) from Github, the items are paginated once there are more than 30. Here is an example of how you can use a recursive function to follow the pagination and return all items of a particular resource.

Given …

Use this command to reset the UUID

VBoxManage internalcommands sethduuid ubuntu-vm/xubuntu-vm.vdi