Django email setup on Hostgator

On Hostgator it is possible to run Django applications with FastCgi, but it has only sendmail as email back-end which is not included in Django.

Hopefully there is a snipets to resolve this limitation. You just needed to change the path of the sendmail file and it was ready to run. The location of sendmail is "/usr/sbin/sendmail" on our Hostgator server.

And the email backend should be configured in your settings.py by adding the following line:

EMAIL_BACKEND = 'sendmail.EmailBackend'

Dajngo app unicode JSON repsonse

If your django application has unicode data, and your view uses jquery and JSON response, do not forget to specify the encoding for the mimetype:

return HttpResponse(simplejson.dumps(your_data),
mimetype='application/json; charset=utf-8')

Open OpenOffice documents from a network share using nautilus

Under my gnome desktop, I had a problem when tired to open documents from a network share with OpenOffice. When I tired the spalsh screen appeared, but the document did not open.

After some searching I found the debian squeze has a package openoffice.org-gnome. I was curious what is the difference between the standard openoffice.org package and this one. Soon I found it's home page: http://projects.gnome.org/ooo/

Almost the first line said:

Gnome-VFS - G/OO.o allows transparent access to allow documents to be loaded / saved from a range of Gnome VFS backends, eg. Samba shares.

I installed and the problem went away.

django-expense v0.2.0

Django-expense, a simple personal expense tracker application for Django.

Version 0.2.0 has just released with the following new features:

• Charts, using flot jQuery library.


• Updated documentation with screen shoots.


• Fixed expense screen appearance with django 1.3.


• Added test application into the source tree to make trying/testing easier.
• Added initial data.

Source code is available on bitbucket.


If you have any question, feel free to open a ticket or send a message.

Have fun!

Resize files using one command

Using ImageMagick it is easy to resize multiple images by the following command:

for i in `ls *.JPG`; do convert -resize 1024 $i $i; done

A bit detailed version of this script can be found in my bitbucket repository: resizer.sh