Eric

Running WordPress on SQL Server

What if I tried to install WordPress on SQL Server instead of MySQL? I mean, what’s the worst that could happen? How else am I going to blow a Sunday afternoon? I was curious. What was it actually like? Wait,…

How to Install WordPress on a DigitalOcean VPS

In this guide I’ll cover what I feel is the best current option for installing WordPress on a DigitalOcean VPS. DigitalOcean has been my preferred web hosting platform for a few years. I’ve set up a handful of servers there,…

Literate Programming in Spacemacs with Racket

Introduction So maybe one day out of the blue you thought to yourself, “I’d really like to work through SICP or The Little Schemer. And wouldn’t it be neat if I could do it all in the ultra-powerful Org-mode so…

How to scrape web pages with Scrapy and Python

Web crawling is a fun and rewarding skill to develop. Here’s how to get a basic web crawler set up with the Scrapy framework for Python. First you’ll need to install Scrapy. On a unixy platform, just execute pip install…

Configure Darkroom for Spacemacs

A little while ago I came across Pete Corey’s post on using Spacemacs and the Olivetti package to configure a minimal, distraction-free writing environment. I’ve used a similar setup for the last couple years, but my implementation uses the Darkroom…

Working with data in SQL Server 2017 and Python 3

Here are steps you can follow to begin working with Microsoft SQL Server databases using Python. Installing SQL Server 2017 Developer I’ll begin with installing SQL Server 2017 Developer Edition. You can get it by downloading it from this page:…

Getting product data from Amazon with Python 3.7

A few months ago I launched an affiliate site written in Python, using the Flask web framework to serve content. The project made for an interesting (and potentially profitable!) way to learn how to build basic web apps with Python.…