This is part 1 of a 4 part series of articles where I explain how I discovered and purchased my laptop by building a web application which scrapes a local PC parts forum and sends automated email alerts when posts featuring specific keywords appear:
Part 1: Let Your Next Laptop Find YOU! (this page)
CarbAlert is a web application which scrapes a local (South African) second-hand computer parts forum for new posts offering laptops featuring keywords of interest (specifically the first page of the “laptops” forum) I’m using Django for the admin console and database/ORM integration, Scrapy for web-scraping, Celery for task management, Flower for task monitoring and Mailgun for sending out alert emails. I am using Docker to manage and run the containers which make up the CarbAlert application.
Overview After a recent sinus/ear infection I began to experience tinnitus. In my case it presents itself as a constant high frequency static hiss/whine in my left ear. It’s been about a month since I first noticed it. Hopefully it will eventually disappear. During the day when I’m at work or around friends I don’t really notice it. However when I’m in a quiet room, such as when falling asleep or in the early morning after waking up, it is quite noticeable and distracting.
Overview I’m working on a project which requires a character LCD to work with a Raspberry Pi. A character LCD is thing displaying the text in the image above. The one I am currently using is a “green backlit 16x2” character LCD. This means that the display is capable of displaying 2 rows of 16 characters, and it features black characters on a green background. There are various sizes and colour combinations (text and backlight) available.
As described in a previous post, I have set up a GitLab CI runner to build and deploy this blog.
For obvious content changes it is easy to see if they have been applied - I can just visit the site itself. For changes that are a bit more “behind the scenes” it may not be so easy to determine if and what changes have been applied. For example: updating the version of Hugo used by the GitLab CI runner to generate the site.
FYI I have decided to “re-brand” this blog under my own name. I have 301’d all the server blocks for practicalmagic.co.za to point to dinofizzotti.com.
I also promise to actually blog more often (sorry).
…or how this blog is built and deployed.
Introduction I’m using the tools and methods described in this post because I wanted to learn more about Hugo, GitLab CI and Docker. I don’t claim this is the best way of combining these technologies, or that everyone should do it this way.
I wanted to create a blog and publish content in a way that felt fun, and at the same time learn something new.
