The PythonAnywhere Newsletter, December 2016


Welcome to our Christmas newsletter! Featuring a selection of the Internet’s very worst Christmas-themed animated Gifs!

snow with christmas tree in foreground

Here’s what we’ve been up to.

Is it called “Reindeer Shaving” at this time of year?

dancing reindeer. sigh.

One change you might have noticed is that the Consoles page now has little Xs for killing consoles. The original idea was just to change them from being links that cause a page refresh to being ajax calls, which would let you kill multiple consoles at the same time. Somehow though, that small user interface tweak turned into the whole office deciding to treat that How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016 comedy blog post as if it were an instruction manual, and we have now spent several days knee deep in React, ES6, promises, webpack, npm, Enzyme, fetch, promises, promises, and many, many more. Still, by the end of it, it all worked, and we have to conclude that ES6 is much nicer to work with than horrible old javascript.

Deep Tarpit

santa throwing a sack around

Santa needs some names for his “naughty or nice” list, and we’ve got some ideas for him!

Our tarpit has always been a soft limit, so going over your CPU allowance isn’t the end of the world, it just slows your processes down, so that people who are within quota get first dibs on the precious cpu-cycles. Some people are taking the mick though, and we’ve now built some tools to detect these “deep tarpit” users, and kill their processes. So, more CPU-time for the good users, and naughty users now get the lowest priority of all, “kill”.

The inside scoop from the forums

animated xmas tree

New modules

Santa on a reindeer

Although you can install Python packages on PythonAnywhere yourself, we like to make sure that we have plenty of batteries included.

  • We have been switching people over to the new dangermouse image! Send us an email if you want to switch.

  • You may have noticed a InsecurePlatformWarning when using pip > 9.0. This is a bug/regression in the pip code for python versions 2.7.9 or lower. We are keeping track of the issue and here are some ways to work around it for now.

New whitelisted sites

santa spinning on a rugby ball or something??

Paying PythonAnywhere customers get unrestricted Internet access, but if you’re a free PythonAnywhere user, you may have hit problems when writing code that tries to access sites elsewhere on the Internet. We have to restrict you to sites on a whitelist to stop hackers from creating dummy accounts to hide their identities when breaking into other people’s websites.

But we encourage you to suggest new sites that should be on the whitelist! Our rule is, if it’s got an official public API (which means that the site’s owners are encouraging automated access to their server) then we’ll whitelist it. Just drop us a line with a link to the API docs.

Here are some sites we’ve added since our last newsletter:

.okta.com
.unwiredlabs.com
app.datadoghq.com
api.discogs.com
api.test.netbanx.com
api.test.paysafe.com
api.tinychat.com
apis.vworld.kr
cps.combain.com
epayment.bbs.no
epayment-test.bbs.no
repo.continuum.io
services.arcgisonline.com
steamcommunity.com
timesofindia.indiatimes.com
vizier.u-strasbg.fr
www.datapowerlearning.com
www.nbrb.by
www.rediff.com

What’s coming up next year?

Over Christmas we’re working on a few small tweaks and improvements, and for early next year, we’re looking to start work on a feature that many of you have been requesting for a long time. But shush! No spoilers ;)

Thanks for reading our newsletter! Tune in the same time next month (ish) for more news from PythonAnywhere.

comments powered by Disqus