Tech

I use Arch Linux on my poor seven year old laptop. My experience has been overwhelmingly positive… buuuuuuuuuuut, there have been a few times that my computers performance has driven me to the edge. Most of those experiences have been in attempting to install packages from the Arch User Repository or the AUR for short. Let’s step back. Quick intro to Arch and a link to the projects home on the web: Arch is a ‘lightweight and flexible Linux® distribution that tries to Keep It Simple.

WordPress. A PHP based CMS with a MySQL database that generates pages as they are requested. Reviled. Loved. Free. Open Source. The most used content management system on the WWW. Make or choose any obnoxious plugin you want. Complain about that free plugin not being maintained well. Whatever. Setting up a local development environment for WordPress (WP) has always been harder than it should have been for me but I won’t be covering that here.

Initiate planning sequence for cleaning up my privacy mess. Step one, leaving Facebook. Since the beginning of personalized ads we’ve been told that ads configured to our habits are better than just random ones. I thought that made sense for a long time. Wouldn’t I rather see ads relevant to my interests? Nope. I don’t want marketing companies tracking my interests. I don’t want my browsing habits and metadata collected for the creation of curated ads or worse.

Finally had some free time to come back to my prepared Django environment and mess around with a starter project. You can follow the same walkthrough I did. I’ll just highlight some of the interesting things learned. Object Models and Django Objects - a way to describe real things in code with properties and actions object properties == property of a thing methods == actions of a thing Applying object model to Django blog posts properties: title, text, author, created_date, published_date methods: publish Applications and Django Create separate apps within prject to keep things organized Create app with manage.