Welcome to Enzed Online!

What does a Kyrgyz glacier have to do with an IT consultancy? Not a lot, but it does highlight one of the fundamental keys of engagement in web design: to pique curiosity on landing on your site to encourage reading on, you've generally got a couple of seconds to do that before the visitor's attention span runs out and they move on to the next attention grabber. Mostly though, it's there because Kyrgyzstan has some of the best and most undeveloped hiking I've ever come across. If you have a chance, go!

This website was created using Python, Django, and Wagtail CMS. On the tech blog, I'll be sharing plenty of experiences, pitfalls, and tips for anyone who might find this beneficial.

About me: I have 23 years of experience in IT across a broad range of industries and roles, mostly as a contractor and consultant, ultimately as head of IT for a leading international tourism company in New Zealand. In between, I love to travel, hike and photograph (the three happily go together), as well as experiment with different cuisines from around the world.

These days, you'll find me in the countryside close to Barcelona. If you're an employer looking to fill a position in your team that you believe I'd be a good fit for, either on a project basis or on a more permanent basis, please visit my About page or contact me directly here. I have rights to work in Spain, the UK, New Zealand, and Australia, and would be happy to consider other locations as well.

Tech Blog

Here, I'll be sharing insights from my professional experiences, studies in data science and web development, and explanations of how this site was built for anyone interested in learning.

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Writing about travel, hiking, photography and cooking

Personal Blog

If technology isn't your thing, check out my other major passions: travel, hiking, photography, and world cuisine. I like to combine as many of these as I can whenever I get the opportunity ...

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Latest Blog Posts

Importing Text From File Into a textarea HTML Form Field

This article covers how to add the ability to read the contents of a text file into a textarea form field from the front end without need to upload anything to the server. We'll go through adding a file input button with file type filter, enabling drag/drop and setting up the necessary JavaScript to handle both events.

We'll tie this together by creating a custom FieldPanel in Wagtail's CMS and add some CSS to tidy things up.

Wagtail - Creating Custom Choosers with Viewsets

Wagtail has a number of basic views for common activities like generating / modifying model instances and chooser modals. Because these frequently involve several related views with shared properties, Wagtail also implements the concept of a viewset, which allows a group of views to be defined and their URLs to be registered with the admin app as a single operation.

This article demonstrates how to create a custom chooser modal for the User model and add responsive filtering to search for records based on a defined set of columns.

Add Unaccent Support in PostgreSQL Search

PostgreSQL has a some pretty useful NLP search capabilities out of the box. However, PostgreSQL search backends will only load the character set native to the language you've set your backend to use. Accented words on an English site won't be searchable with unaccented terms for example.

I show a quick way to load the full extended character set into a custom backend and take you through how to verify that the search is indexing and returning results as desired from the command prompt. Finally, I'll use the custom backend for my Wagtail site search to return pages with unaccented queries.

Wagtail: Extending the Draftail Editor Part 4 - Custom Lists

The fourth part of this series looks at creating custom lists in Draftail, including the limitations considering this is not currently a supported feature in the editor.

I'll show how to create custom list styles within those limitations, and also how you can use a custom list to apply styling around a group of consecutive blocks of the same type.

Configuring a Dynamic Sitemap on Wagtail

A sitemap lists a website’s most important pages, making sure search engines can find and crawl them. It's important to keep your sitemap up to date for optimal SEO.

With a quick bit of coding, you can set your sitemap to be created dynamically on demand, ensuring it always reflects the latest content.

We'll go through adjusting the lastmod field, and add values for the changefreq and priority on site, class or page level.

I'll show you how to add support for xhtml alternate entries for multi-lingual sites using a custom view in place of the built-in Wagtail sitemap app.

Finally, I add a method to notify Google of updates automatically on page publish/delete.

Making Wagtail pages more SEO friendly with Wagtail Metadata

Wagtail pages are great for creating a lot of rich content straight out of the box, but for SEO optimization, they need some tweaking.

Here, I subclass the Page model with some help from the wagtail-metadata plug-in.

This subclassed model becomes the base for all site pages and holds all the data for og metadata, twitter cards, page description etc..

Improve Response Times and SSL Security on Your NGINX Web Server

NGINX is a lightweight and fast web server that meets the content delivery needs of most small to medium sites. Loading speed is now a crucial metric in how the search engines rank websites.

With a little basic configuration you can vastly improve the performance of your server and reduce delivery times. Here, I give an introduction to enabling HTTP/2, gzip compression and cache headers.

We'll also add a few changes to tighten SSL security with a stronger ciphers list, Strict Transport Security (HSTS) and add a CAA record to our DNS.

Loquat Chutney

Loquats have to be one of the most underrated fruits around, although their season is so short fruiting briefly in the springtime. While it's a short season, the trees produce a vast amount of fruit all at once. Here's a great way to preserve some of that excess fruit.

Create Thumbnails with Preserved Edges Using Python Image Library

The Python Image Library (Pillow or PIL) has a host of image processing methods available to create images on-the-fly.

If you ever had the annoyance of uploading an image to a website, only to have it cropped to fit a certain aspect ratio, then this article is for you. I walk through creating thumbnails where the entire image is displayed without cropping or stretching while meeting the thumbnail dimension requirements

I'll also go through how to add this as an image filter in Wagtail so you can create thumbnail renders for your metadata.

Creating Responsive Font Sizes Based on the Viewport

Previously, responsive typography required a series of media queries, font definitions, and other complexities. All of that has changed thanks to widespread browser support for variable fonts and the all-important CSS clamp() function.

I'll show you how to linearly scale text between a set of minimum and maximum sizes when the width of the viewport changes, with the goal of making its behaviour at different screen sizes more predictable without the use of media queries and with only one line of CSS. Use the on-screen calculator to build your font sizes.

Wagtail: Extending the Draftail Editor Part 3 - Dynamic Text

In this third part of extending the Draftail editor, I introduce a way to add dynamic inline text to your rich text blocks using a combination of dummy css class definition and JavaScript rather than the overly complicated entity route.

I'll go through an example of adding inline Font Awesome icons as a proof of concept which could be easily adapted to show any dynamic information such as stock indices, exchange rates, availability of a resource etc..

Wagtail: Extending the Draftail Editor Part 2 - Block Styles

The second part of this series looks at customising and adding block styles to the Draftail rich text editor.

We walk through customising the blockquote style, add text alignment buttons to the editor as an example and then consider a different way to accomplish this outside of the editor with a StructBlock and why that might be preferable.