We are no strangers to hacking at stuff here in the lab and we love building useful tools and add-ons using our own APIs. In that long running
tradition, I wanted to announce a little pet project I started a few days ago.
fixx Django Middleware (I know it's original) is the aptly named
middleware app for people who run Django sites/applications. It provides an exception handler in the middleware that allows you to log exceptions
that occur in your Django instance directly to your fixx instance encouraging pro-active problem solving than waiting for visitors to report
bugs in your Django site/app.
The middleware component does required fixx 1.8+ to work with.
You can grab a copy of the code which is licensed under the BSD
license and is free for you to modify.
Why not take a look at some of these other API-enabled tools/add-ons for fixx we are working on and even see if you can contribute?
I am a huge fan of Mozilla Ubiquity and have been using it a lot recently to improve my in-browser productivity. Combined with Quicksilver on the desktop, this creates a powerful suite of productivity tools for power users like me.
I wanted to share an Ubiquity command I now use to search my fixx instance and access issues directly (by just typing the fixx issue number) from any page I am in. Just remember to replace localhost:9000 in the script with the URL of your fixx installation.
Fluid is a SSB that allows you to wrap your frequently used web applications and sites in it's own browser and activate them as individual applications.
This means you get a separate application for your fixx installation that you can launch from your Applications folder (or using Quicksilver) and use the fixx icon for your application and have it appear in your dock.
Here are 2 high res logos for our products that you can use to your heart's content in your Fluid applications.
We, here at the lab, appreciate the value of letting the user hack out their own solutions to problems that they may have stumbled upon that don't fit our vision. There's barely a day goes by that you won't hear Mark suggest a rubbish new feature, get instantly shot down, and then insist that he'll write a Greasemonkey script for that functionality anyway.
With this in mind, the fixx team have always maintained that there will be a fixx API, so that developers may adapt fixx to meet their bug tracking needs. While still in relatively early stages, that API is coming together and you can check out the progress in the beta by going to any issues screen and appending .xml or .json to the URI (/issues.json, for example). This was still mostly unusable (unless you want to jump through some pretty hefty hoops), until recently when Sarat committed a change to allow basic HTTP authentication. This change is not available to the masses yet, however, to show off its potential usefulness, I've put together a quick shell one-liner to get the number of issues assigned to me:
curl -u user:password http://SERVER/issues.xml?qAssignedTo=19 | xmlstarlet sel -t -v "count(//issue)"
Which when fed into conky, an ace Linux desktop text rendering app, leaves you with a widget that looks a bit like this:
Useless? yes. Limited? Of course. But if this divvy can use it, you won't have any trouble whatsoever.
