Using hilite.me

I discovered that you can use hilite.me to format source code so it looks nice on blogger.

Paste the source into hilite.me. It gives you pretty html that you can paste into an html editor

print("Hello World");

Write code that uses django's settings.py file if django is installed

 

I'm writing a library file for django, and I want it to store settings in the settings.py file, which is django's default configuration location for settings. However, I still want the library to work if django isn't installed. Here's how I did it :

You can wrap an import statement in a try except block

This way, it doesn't crash if the reference doesn't exist

try:
    from django.conf import settings
except ImportError:
    pass

Test to see if the referenced object exists before using it in code

Research online said python doesn't have a direct way to check if the reference exists, so you can use a try / except block instead

try: settings
   except NameError: settings = None

Test to see if 'settings' is None

If settings exists, use the django settings.py file. Otherwise use a flat file

if settings != None:
   if not settings.configured:
      settings.configure()
      self._key_list = settings.MY_LIB_SETTINGS
   else:
      filename = "lib_api_config.txt"
      f = open(filename,"r")
      file_contents = f.read()
      f.close()
      self._key_list = json.loads(file_contents)

ArcGIS Developer Account "Hello World"

I just signed up for an ArcGIS developer account here. I'm working with the javascript developer SDK, and found some issues with the example code found in the edit api link tab

The edit api page has a sample html / javascript code that you can put on your server to display a "Hello World" type application that displays a map.

I had some issues, which I've noted above

• The api key needs to be surrounded in quotes
• The first time I loaded the page, I got a bunch of errors because I didn't expand the bottom section before I copied the code out of the editor with the "copy" button

Once I fixed these issues, I got a pretty map of highway 1 in Malibu.  Hooray!