Lonely Lion

Flash can speak XML-RPC (to Zope)!

Some cool information, including a bug fix for Flash.

I made some significant progress on my Amazon online bookstore. I also found out that Petsmart has a similar affiliate program to Amazon:

PETsMART.com Affiliate Program

I really like this trend.

Dive Into Python

Answers some Python questions I’ve had for a while.

Python and XML in general

Uche Ogbuji writes about Python and XML for O’Reilly and IBM. His articles are always on point, easy to understand, and useful. This is a weblog he maintains.

ASPN : Mailing List Archive

Phew, I’m glad I found this. I was worried I was going to have to come up with a port per app. Activestate’s Cookbook’s and Archives are really great.

ASPN : Python Cookbook : SimpleXMLRPCServer niceties

Smarty and Pear::DB
Python Meta Classes

I can’t read them right now, but they both seem pretty good. It’s funny that they came out the day after I declared that I wanted to do some projects with both concepts. Cool.

dive into mark

This guy has written an Amazon API wrapper and a Google wrapper in Python. He’s my new best friend! Look for that Amazon book thing sooner than later, Mark has done a bunch of the leg work for me.

I’m working on a few things:

1) I opened up my first Sourceforge Project, Yang. Yang is a PHP based Netbackup Monitoring tool. I wrote it for work, and decided to release it as an Open Source project. It’s still pretty rough looking, I hope to rewrite it pretty significantly in the near future. The “guts” of the system are two Perl scripts and a MySQL backend. The frontend is a bunch of PHP scripts. I’d like to rewrite the backend in Python, and split up the frontend with a templating system. My goal is make the code as modular as possible.

2) The Smaug / BNT API. I’m writing a Python script that will make it easy to publish Smaug (our MUD) and BNT statistics on lonelylion.com.

3) LDAP. The Chicago Perl Mongers group got me hooked up to write a review of the O’Reilly LDAP book for the Chicago PM mailing list. It’s a cool assignment, and it also meant that I got a free copy of the book. I want to set up a directory server on my home network. I’d also like to see lonelylion.com start authenticating users against the directory. Then, if I can integrate the Smaug / BNT API with LDAP, I’d be the coolest person in the world. I’d like to set it up where Smaug and BNT characters are automatically given accounts on lonelylion.com, to flesh out their characters. It’s definitly do-able.

4) I want to build an E-commerce site with Paypal as a backend. The PayPal Developer Network is pretty bad ass. I wasn’t really aware of how many tools they have available. This ties in with that Amazon bookstore project that I never finished. I’m going to use the user management system I wrote for the Amazon project.

Lots of projects. I wanted to get them all out on the table. I think there’s enough similarities between them that I’ll be able to work on them side by side. They’re all mostly going to be written in PHP. My big goal is to start writing PHP with Smarty in mind. Smarty is a slick templating system. My big frustration with PHP is how integrated the code and display have been. If I can seperate those two things out, logic from presentation, then it’ll be easier for me to write the code, and Camri to build interfaces for me. She’s wicked good at interfaces.

Cheetah – The Python-Powered Template Engine

I’ve been looking for this.