I run a website called Notfellchen that list animals that are waiting for adoption. It’s currently restricted to fancy rats in Germany and that for good reason: Running this website involves checking every shelter every two weeks manually. You need to visit the website, check if there are new animals, contact the shelter and add them to notfellchen if they allow it. This takes time. A lot.

This blog post will outline some of the things I did in order to streamline this and make it possible to check every german shelter in 2.5 hours.

Lately I worked on notification e-mails for notfellchen.org. Initially I just sent text notifications without links to the site. Terrible idea! An E-Mail notification I send always has Call-to-Action or at minimum a link to more information.

I left the system like this for half a year because it kinda worked for me (didn’t suck enough for me to care), and I was the main receiver of these notifications. However, as the platform is developed further and more users join I need to think about more user-centric notifications.

Introduction

In the previous post I outlined how to set up a Nominatim server that allows us to find a geolocation for any address on the planet. Now let’s use our newfound power in Django. Again, all code snippets are CC0 so make free use of them. But I’d be very happy if you tell me if you use them for something cool!

Prerquisites

• You have a working geocoding server or use a public one
• You have a working django app

If you want to do geocoding in a different environment you will still be able to use a lot of the the following examples, just skip the Django-specifics and configure the GEOCODING_API_URL according to your needs.

Introduction

RSS is amazing! While not everyone thinks that, most people that understand RSS, like it. This presents a problem, as most people don’t have chance to learn about it. Unless there is a person in the community that doesn’t shut up about how great RSS is (maybe that person is you), they might not even know what it is, let alone use it.

One big reason for this is, that when you click an link to an RSS feed you download a strange file that most people don’t know how to deal with. Maybe your browser is nice and renders some XML which is also not meant for human consumption. Wouldn’t it be better if people clicked on the RSS link and were greeted by a text explaining RSS and how to use it? And if the site would still be a valid RSS feed?