Latest from the blog

The .xyz Top Level Domain

For personal projects, to keep things as cheap as possible, creating a website with a .xyz top level domain is a cost efficient way of adding a custom domain to your personal project.

15 July 2020 by Martin Dawson

How To Read Excel Files With Python (xlrd)

If you need the power of Python to read files from Microsoft Excel, so as you can analyse, and crunch a large set of data, one of the Python packages you can use to do this is xlrd

14 July 2020 by Martin Dawson

Base64 Encode a String with Python

It is a quite a niche thing, but if you need to Base64 Encode

13 July 2020 by Martin Dawson

Older Articles

Creating a Zip File of a Directory With Python

Sometimes, automation of website deployments require you to post a zipped up directory containing your website to an API. Python makes this easy!

12 July 2020 by Martin Dawson

Reading and Writing JSON Files with Python

Grabbing data in JSON format from an API and storing it in files can be very useful, and here is the Python code that will do it.

11 July 2020 by Martin Dawson

Using Environment Variables with Python in Netlify

Netlify has well documented examples of using their environment variables functionality with Javascript, but not much information for the other languages supported. Here is my experience of using Netlify environment variables with Python.

10 July 2020 by Martin Dawson

How to Rebuild Your Website Everyday

Using IFTTT with Netlify you can schedule a job to rebuild your website automatically.

09 July 2020 by Martin Dawson

Data Science Resources

Some links to books, podcasts and courses if you want some information about learing more about data science.

08 July 2020 by Martin Dawson

Ultimate Guide to the HEAD Element

You may not see most of what goes into the HEAD tag in your sites HTML, but it can have a big impact on how other people might see your webpage.

07 July 2020 by Martin Dawson

Getting Elements Of A List In Python

A quick guide to accessing various elements of a list in Python

06 July 2020 by Martin Dawson

Setting Up a Server for Serverless

Even for serverless, you sometimes need a server!

05 July 2020 by Martin Dawson

Scraping Spotify using Python

How to use the Beautiful Soup package to extract data items from a website

04 July 2020 by Martin Dawson

Why I Use Python With Static Sites

How I landed on Python to assist with generating sites after stumbling with Javascript and Bash

03 July 2020 by Martin Dawson

Getting Started with Jekyll

Jekyll got me in to Static Site Generators, and remains a sensible choice for many types of website.

02 July 2020 by Martin Dawson

4 Ways To Deploy Your Static Site with Netlify

Some different approaches to get your website live with Netlify

01 July 2020 by Martin Dawson

Automate the Spotify API With Python

Using the Python Requests library, let's see how you might go about fetching some data from Spotify

30 June 2020 by Martin Dawson

The Most Important Thing Every Website Needs

Without this, you have nothing!

29 June 2020 by Martin Dawson

Static Sites Are Great!

Why I am such an advocate for statically generated websites.

28 June 2020 by Martin Dawson