Thursday, 4th December 2025
I take tap dance evening classes at the College of San Mateo community college. A neat bonus of this is that I'm now officially a student of that college, which gives me access to their library... including the ability to send text messages to the librarians asking for help with research.
I recently wrote about Coutellerie Nontronnaise on my Niche Museums website, a historic knife manufactory in Nontron, France. They had a certificate on the wall claiming that they had previously held a Guinness World Record for the smallest folding knife, but I had been unable to track down any supporting evidence.
I posed this as a text message challenge to the librarians, and they tracked down the exact page from the 1989 "Le livre guinness des records" describing the record:
Le plus petit
Les établissements Nontronnaise ont réalisé un couteau de 10 mm de long, pour le Festival d’Aubigny, Vendée, qui s’est déroulé du 4 au 5 juillet 1987.
Thank you, Maria at the CSM library!
Django 6.0 released. Django 6.0 includes a flurry of neat features, but the two that most caught my eye are background workers and template partials.
Background workers started out as DEP (Django Enhancement Proposal) 14, proposed and shepherded by Jake Howard. Jake prototyped the feature in django-tasks and wrote this extensive background on the feature when it landed in core just in time for the 6.0 feature freeze back in September.
Kevin Wetzels published a useful first look at Django's background tasks based on the earlier RC, including notes on building a custom database-backed worker implementation.
Template Partials were implemented as a Google Summer of Code project by Farhan Ali Raza. I really like the design of this. Here's an example from the documentation showing the neat inline attribute which lets you both use and define a partial at the same time:
{# Define and render immediately. #}
{% partialdef user-info inline %}
<div id="user-info-{{ user.username }}">
<h3>{{ user.name }}</h3>
<p>{{ user.bio }}</p>
</div>
{% endpartialdef %}
{# Other page content here. #}
{# Reuse later elsewhere in the template. #}
<section class="featured-authors">
<h2>Featured Authors</h2>
{% for user in featured %}
{% partial user-info %}
{% endfor %}
</section>You can also render just a named partial from a template directly in Python code like this:
return render(request, "authors.html#user-info", {"user": user})
I'm looking forward to trying this out in combination with HTMX.
I asked Claude Code to dig around in my blog's source code looking for places that could benefit from a template partial. Here's the resulting commit that uses them to de-duplicate the display of dates and tags from pages that list multiple types of content, such as my tag pages.