Personal Blog of Truong Phan

The journal of what I've learned

Python and Google App Engine to save my Delicious account

Google App Engine logoSince I known Python one year ago, I wanted to dig deeper and study it seriously, but because of many reasons, for a while I can’t follow it. In these holidays, instead of travelling, I stayed at home with the family and use the spare time for learning Python. Actually, Python is a powerful language. It helps me to understand the OOP easily, however it’s also difficult to master and apply all the statements, concepts, syntax … to the real world. As my background is web development with PHP, I decided to try Google App Engine, and it’s really an amazing platform, especially the SDK. It’s pretty much straight forward, and well-organized document, supported both database and files in one unified system. Next, I need to think about some application to focus on, and start writing, I was thinking about my Delicious account at that time.

Except Flickr, Delicious is one of my favorite web application from Yahoo. Even I found that Instapaper is working very well, when combined with its iPad application, I still need to transfer all existed bookmarks to my new account.  As the result, I’ve spent the whole weekend to write a small application to import all my Delicious bookmarks to my new Instapaper account due to some rumor about being shut down. This simple application turned more challenging than I thought due to the limited API from Instapaper, yet I’ve learnt a lot of useful aspects from Google App Engine and Python language. I believe that many of you also have the same need, you may try to import bookmarks from Delicious to Instapaper here, and I am still enhancing it with more features.

A new blog !

Yup, it’s been a long time I didn’t write anything, and there are a ton of reasons for that, but I never want to stop blogging. So, today, I started a completely new blog again, even I have wrote on another domain since 2007. At that time, it took me more than 3 hours to install WordPress, but now, only 15 mins, and 10 more for the selection of the theme. Definitely, I will create my own them soon or late, but when browsing around, I really love this Mainfest because of its simplicity. That’s for now.