When Automated Checks Strike Back
Earlier tonight I tried to post a Link item to my blog to The Typefaces playing cards. There was just one problem: the site wasn't responding very quickly, timing out on several occasions (on my internet connection, at least). Now, that might seem like a trivial issue, but I'm running a Django back-end for my own site which has helpful features like URL validation. Validation which, if the site times out, doesn't let you submit your post, claiming the site doesn't exist.
Obviously, that's not a desirable outcome under such circumstances. Much better would be to either fail and ask for confirmation to continue submission anyway, or to succeed with a warning message.
Now, it turns out that what I thought was a fun collaboration done by a dozen or so people I have the honor of calling friends, was in fact someone else's effort to sell a product using the likenesses of my friends without their permission. This is an unrelated issue to what this post is about, but it's just plain uncool and that needs to be repeated.
Update: the ever-helpful Jeff Croft pointed me to the verify_exists flag in Django's URLField, which is on by default but obviously my needs require it to be set to false.
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