For some years, I've run a hobby project, open to all, but mostly used by a few of my friends and family, called LibraryHippo. I find it useful, and for a long time, it was a joy to work on.
Lately, the project's not much fun. I've had the urge …
Since Google is deprecating OpenID 2.0 support, I decided to update LibraryHippo to authenticate via OAuth 2.0, which is a story in itself, but I'm here to talk about what happened next.
LibraryHippo has a set of handlers that are accessed primarily via the Cron and Task Queue …
A few days ago, a user e-mailed me a bug report for LibraryHippo. For the previous 55 days, she'd been receiving the same (erroneous) morning e-mail about what library materials she had due. However, when she checked her family's account summary on the web page, it was correct.
(The exact …
Now that Google has announced that Python 2.7 is fully supported on Google App Engine, I figured I should get my act in gear and make convert LibraryHippo over. I'd had a few aborted attempts earlier, but this time things are going much better.
I'm a fan of Test-driven development, and automated testing in general. As such, I’ve been trying ensure that the LibraryHippo code has an adequate set of automated tests before deploying new versions.
Unfortunately, testing code that relies on the Google App Engine SDK is …
After hearing about the release of Google's App Engine SDK 1.3.1, I rushed out to try the new Appstats Event Recorder to help profile LibraryHippo. I didn't expect great things, as I'm generally happy with the performance, with one notable exception, but I was curious about the tool …
Sometimes when we wait a little, the universe provides for us. Last year, I was holding off taking LibraryHippo live because it's almost useless without daily notifications. At the time, Google App Engine had no scheduled tasks. I'd just resigned myself to soliciting users and setting up a cron job …
LibraryHippo's main function is fetching current library account status for patrons. Since I have no special relationship with any of the libraries involved, LibraryHippo web scrapes the libraries' web interfaces.
The library websites issue cookies and redirects, so I needed to do something to augment the URL Fetch Python …