29 May 2020 Updated 29 May 2020
by
Peter
There are many types of vector icons. In this post I only look at SVG-icons, and limit myself to navigation icons, sometimes also called interface icons. These icons not only look nice on websites, they also color and scale like fonts. And they are very functional. Imagine a button with the text ' Edit' in it. Replace this text with a pencil-icon and you get more space on the page while it still is ...
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12 May 2020 Updated 12 May 2020
by
Peter
This site is running Flask. It uses DispatcherMiddleWare to run the frontend app and the admin app. The Flask documents state that the Flask applications in this case are entirely isolated from each other. That is true but often there is a lot of code we want to share between these apps.
Things we want to share
Both apps use the same database meaning we want to share the models.py file. Then we ...
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26 April 2020 Updated 27 April 2020
by
Peter
This website uses Flask, (plain) SQLAlchemy with Alembic for migrations and MariaDb. If you do not use these, this post probably is not what you are looking for.
In a previous post I wrote why many websites should use UUID Primary Keys instead of Integer Primary Keys. Even if you have a high performance website then probably only few tables are responsible for this performance. High performance websites ...
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16 April 2020 Updated 16 April 2020
by
Peter
You have a website and it works fine. But you notice that certain visitors are trying to mess with your forms. They come from specific IP addresses. Then there are also bots that are scanning your site. Some are necessary but others should stay away. Don't you hate this? I do. In the past I once wrote a module that returned a not so nice response very slowly, byte-by-byte, slowing down their systems. ...
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9 April 2020 Updated 9 April 2020
by
Peter
We all know the Integer Autoincrement Primary Key. Works great, much software is doing it this way. It is fast. But it also has limitations.
An alternative for the Integer Autoincrement Primary Key is the UUID (Universally Unique IDentifier) Primary Key. A UUID is a 128-bit number. It can be represented by a string, for example:
05390f2b-48e8-45c7-8ae4-08272dc69122
or a hex string (the same as above ...
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24 March 2020 Updated 25 March 2020
by
Peter
Flask is hot. Everyone loves Flask. I believe the main reason is that it is so easy to start with Flask. You create a virtual environment, copy-paste a few lines of code from some example, point your browser at 127.0.0.1:5000 and there is your page. Then you hack a little with a Jinja template and you get a beautiful page. You can even run Flask on a Raspberry Pi, isn't that wonderful? My main reason ...
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10 March 2020 Updated 11 March 2020
by
Peter
The problem: a customer wants an application with a certain functionality and want this yesterday. What you do is look for a plug-and-play solution, libraries and/or extensions. You tell your customer that you can do it, customer is happy, you do it. For example, you take Wordpress, select and configure some plugins. Problem solved, or is it?
Yes, the problem is solved but for how long? After some ...
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29 February 2020 Updated 29 February 2020
by
Peter
I never really checked if CSRF protection was working in my Flask application, this website. Is it enabled by default? From the Flask_WTF extension documentation:
Any view using FlaskForm to process the request is already getting CSRF protection.
And from the text of Miguel Grinberg's post 'Cookie Security for Flask Applications':
If you are handling your web forms with the Flask-WTF extension, ...
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22 February 2020 Updated 22 February 2020
by
Peter
While working on comments system for the first time I bounced into the problem of having multiple WTForms forms on a single page. On every page there also is the search form but this is not a POST form. It is doing a GET. The comments system uses two forms:
Comment form
Comment reply form
The comment form is immediately below the content item, blog post or page, the comment reply form is initially ...
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15 February 2020 Updated 18 February 2020
by
Peter
I hoped to tell you today that you could comment on the blog posts of this website now. That would have meant that I completed the first implementation of the comments system. Unfortunately I stumbled upon some problems, yes of course, I am a programmer, and one of them involved the TextAreaField.
I just wanted a simple extended version of the WTForm TextAreaField, just add a character counter field ...
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Welcome
This website is a multi-language CMS / Blog I build with Python, the framework Flask and SQLAlchemy. It is deployed on my ISPConfig3 (Nginx + Mariadb) server using Docker which is also used for development. Read more
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