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2023-11-24 - Adding Google Analytics to Sphinx
Creating and maintaining a website is a lot of work and it is nice to know which pages are being visited and how people are finding your site. Google Analytics is a great tool for this and it is easy to add to your Sphinx site. But adding it to your Sphinx Sphinx blog is not as easy as it could be. This post will show you how to add Google Analytics to your Sphinx site instead of modifiying the theme or template files.
The first step is to create a Google Analytics account and get your tracking ID. This is a long string that looks like
G-XXXXXXXXX. You can find it in the admin section of your Google Analytics account.2023-09-30 - Use magic methods __setitem__() and __getitem__() in Python
In Python, there are two magic methods that can be used to implement the behavior of the subscript operator
[]. These methods areobject.__setitem__()andobject.__getitem__(). The first one is used to assign a value to an item, the second one is used to retrieve an item.The following example shows how to use these methods to implement a memory class as a list of bytes that was used in the 6502 emulator. The memory class has two methods
get()andset()that are used to retrieve and assign a value to a memory address.2023-09-14 - Chaining methods in Python
Method chaining is a programming style in which multiple method calls are made on the same object, in sequence. Each method call returns the object itself, so the next method can be called on it without having to assign the object to a variable in between.
This can make code more concise and readable, as it can be written as a single line of code instead of multiple lines. It can also make code more efficient, as the object does not have to be passed around between methods.
2023-09-04 - Using environment variables in a devcontainer
Hardcoded variables are never a good idea and one solution is the update the during deployment with Ansible for example. Another option is to set read those variables from the environment and maintaining them via systemd via a separate environment file or as part of the container deployment.
The example below is how Django reads the environment variables to configure the database connection to Postgresql. This way the application can easily be configured as is described in Environment variables set by systemd and the application itself never has to be modified or redeployed.
2023-09-01 - Reporting Flake8 finding as GitHub Annotations
In Extending GitHub Actions with Annotations the output of GitHub Actions was transformed into Annotations that could be shown in the web interface. The example shows that part for Flake8 which is a framework for different plugins to be combined and scan Python code on common mistakes and improvements. But later in 2023 a plugin was release for Flake8 to generate a report that can be used by GitHub Annotations.
By changing to GitHub Actions workflow file as shown in the example below, then the plugin flake8-github-annotations is installed and the flake8 commands are executed with the option
--format githublike as with yamllint. The lines to add the probem matcher can also be removed.