117 Items for 2008
Better Web App Development
An interesting video (.mov file) covering a number of ways to produce web applications, including JSEE/JSP, Ruby on Rails, Plone, TurboGears, and Django. I really liked that the author showed the coding process for each one giving the viewer insight into each toolset. In the end it looks like Plone won out with Django coming in a close 2nd.
How Many HTML Elements Can You Name in 5 Minutes?
This is kinda fun in a stress you out and rack your brain kind of way. I got 57 out of 91 html elements. Remembering h1-h6 felt good.
Front Range Pythoneering: Django on Jython: Minding the Gap
Django running on Jython. Great news. Sounds like lots of good things for both Django and Jython.
John Resig - Untold JavaScript Secrets
Wow... definitely a book I'd like to read.
DojoX DTL (Django Template Language) | The Dojo Toolkit
An implementation of Django Templates in Javascript, brought to you buy the Dojo Toolkit.
Cornerz 0.1
A rounded corner javascript using jQuery that uses Canvas/VML for rendering.
Python Google Chart
A Python wrapper for Google's charting API that generates URLs and grabs images.
DOS ain't so bad after all ~ Authentic Boredom
Nice insight, but I love how web interfaces can add keyboard shortcuts. For example, I never miss my Mutt email client when Gmail has great support for keyboarding.
PyFacebook
PyFacebook is a thin wrapper for accessing Facebook's RESTful API through Python. I like the integration with manage.py to layout the facebook app skeleton.
Automatic conversion from simple, accessible data tables to YUI Charts » Yahoo! User Interface Blog
A very nice example of progressively enhancing an HTML table into a graphical chart, using YUI tools.
Deploying Compacted Javascript with Django
A Django management command plugin to concatenate and minify Javascript files to reduce HTTP requests and file size. I love how it ties into Django and the DEBUG state.
Apple Announces Free iPod Recycling Program at US Retail Stores
I didn't know about this program (or had forgotten). I may have to take advantage of it soon!
Django People
Simon Willison pushed out a Django website that shows Django users by location. See Django users near you.
Blueprint Grid CSS Generator
A grid generator for Blueprint CSS that lets you specify number of columns, column width, gutter width, and overall page width. It then generates the grids.css file in both normal and compressed versions, and a grid.png file for testing. Nicely done.
Fabric
Fabric is a simple pythonic remote deployment tool. This looks like a good Capistrano replacement for Python deployment.
Hackszine.com: HOW TO Create an Encrypted Disk Image in OS X
I just read about a story of someone's laptop being stolen with their tax information on it. I've got TurboTax running on my laptop while I work on my tax return. Now it's AES-256 encrypted: There's a feature built into OS X that will allow you to create AES encrypted disk images. You can use this to create mountable, encrypted virtual drives, or even burn password protected CDs.
Synthesia, Piano for Everyone
It's like Guitar Hero but for learning Piano. Best use is with a midi keyboard. It's open source and has a Mac build.
Daily Kos: State of the Nation
Someone digs into the Library of Congress to really look at what bills were introduced by Clinton and Obama, and based on that, who should one vote for. Actions speak louder than words.
Five great auditory illusions
Auditory illusions can help us understand the workings of the brains - listen to five of the most striking examples
Subversion Tools and Contrib
Some interesting tools and scripts for Subversion.
BIL Conference - Minds Set Free.
Foo Camp : Bar Camp :: TED Conference : BIL Conference. Love the Bill & Ted reference.
iCalendar package for Python
This looks to be a pretty nice iCal package. I need something like this for our homebrew club's events list.
BzrVsGit - Bazaar Version Control
Interesting overview of why bzr might be preferred over git.
Nine Inch Nails made at least $750k from CC release in two days - Boing Boing
I see the future of music distribution, and the RIAA isn't a part of it...
TextMate Blog » Git Bundle
Nice... a Git bundle for Textmate.
Thmbnl.com
An online website thumbnail service.
Git - SVN Crash Course
Subversion to Git crash course tutorial. Lots of useful side-by-side command comparisons.
Simplistic Complexity » Cleanly Migrate Your Subversion Repository To a GIT Repository
How to migrate your subversion project to git without all the svn cruft.
rossp.org - Blog Entry: Mixing OpenID into Django's authentication system
A good post with source on integrating Simon Willison's django-openid with the built-in Django authentication system and django-registration. All the bits needed for nice OpenID integration.
HTTP status code flowchart
A great flowchart showing the various HTTP status codes.
I Can Haz Hardcore Forking Action
Recently myself and a few co-workers (@davemerwin, @bradpitcher, Percy and Nate) got together for what we called, "Django Night: 3 Hours 1 App", in which we attempted to build a website from start to finish in 3 hours using Django. We also decided to learn and use Git and GitHub ...
Google Charts API adds maps
The Google Charts API is growing and just added maps. To play I mapped all the US states that I've either lived in, visited, or driven through. Here's my map:
Ubuntu 8.04
Installing Ubuntu 8.04 on my MacBook Pro
One of our Django sites finally went public
I'm excited to finally be able to announce a Django project we've worked on at ORCAS that was recently released to the general public.
The website's official title is Brain Injury Partners: Navigating the School System and is designed to give parents of school-aged children with a ...
Brain Injury Partners: Navigating the School System
A site we at ORCAS built using Django. The website is designed to give parents of school-aged children with a brain injury the skills they need to become successful advocates.
SonSpring | 960 Grid System
The 960 Grid System looks like a well thought out CSS framework. I personally like the differences in it vs. Blueprint CSS.
Sharing git repositories via OS X's built-in web sharing
A nice tip that shows how to share a git repository directly from your Mac laptop. This would be great for local hack fests and taking full advantage of git's distributed nature.
The Thing About Git
Ryan Tomayko put up a great post on how git handles the "Tangled Working Copy Problem". It happens to me too, and I didn't know about the --patch option.
jQuery-database
The ability to get DOM elements from an HTML table via jQuery using SQL-like syntax. Very slick.
Super Fly Monkeys
My office mates just love it when I slingshot my monkeys over their heads and they screach with glee. They never grow tired of it. They love me more each time I do it. It never gets old.
Command Line History
A meme is going around that shares stats of your command line history. So here's mine:
$ history | awk '{print $2}' | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn | head 135 git 88 cd 83 ls 42 ./manage.py 37 python 22 less 15 vim 13 cat 11 sudo 9 fg
django-voting - Google Code
A voting add-on for Django that can apply voting (+1/-1) to any model, with templatetags and generic views.
Scatter pictures with Google Charts
A fun Python trick: you can use the Python Imaging Library to convert a picture into a URL which Google charts will render as the original picture.
Queryset Refactor Branch
Malcolm's Queryset Refactor branch landed on Django's trunk tonight. To mark the occasion I'm bookmarking a link to the page that describes in detail the changes.
iBanjo » Blog Archive » Subversion’s Future?
Git and Mercurial threaten Subversion? It looks like Subversion will still focus on being a good centralized source control system.
GitPython - Gitorious
Nice work by Michael Trier on GitPython, a python library for interfacing with Git.
Obama to speak at UofO May 9, 2008
I snapped a quick shot of the pre-setup since I happened to be on campus today.
Google Doctype - Google Code
For web developers, by web developers. The wiki has tons of articles on web security, DOM manipulation, CSS, and other various tips and tricks. Lots of great stuff from Mark Pilgrim.
Daniella with pony tail
My beautiful daughter sporting a pony tail, grinning, and playing with her belly button.
Todai!
Sushi plate at Todai in Portland
django-compress - Google Code
An app with management command to concatenate and compress Javascript and CSS files. It also handles cache busting by appending a date string. I've done this manually with Makefiles but this looks more integrated and easy.
Huntin' for a Chicken
Dinner with friends.
django-ae-utils - Google Code
Utilities to replace Django's built-in auth and session functionality to use Google App Engine's and Big Table.
Freelancing Gods: Sphinx: A Primer
A good Sphinx primer.
LJWorld.com / New foundation for Django
This is great news for Django and all contributors involved. Django deserves its success. Here's to a great future of Django!
The Champagne of Blogs » Makin Bacon
I never knew making bacon was such a process. And interesting, entertaining read with pictures to salivate to.
Django and Relativity
My default Django settings file has changed over time to now include settings that do not depend on the location of the project on the filesystem. This is great in a team environment where more than one person is working on the same project, or when deploying your project to ...
Django code_swarm on Vimeo
Visualization of Django commit history. I especially liked the near end when the queryset refactor branch landed on trunk and results in a firework like display, then just moments later a couple more fireworks as the other branches merge with trunk.
pytoss - Google Code
A remote deployment tool written in Python with a focus more on shell commands than recipes for simplicity.
mallipeddi's django-yslow at master — GitHub
A very nice Django app following the YSlow recommended best practices for optimizing your website. It includes Django management utilities to minimize and concatenate CSS/JS, version it for cache busting, and upload to S3 and set appropriate expiry and content-encoding headers.
Family Shadows
Everybody hold hands!
Django snippets: Client-side django template with jQuery
A simple snippet that extends the regular expression syntax of the jQuery Template plugin to support Django style templates in jQuery.
Eugene '08 Olympic Pre-trials
Looks impressive, even with nobody there.
mysql_cluster
This database backend enables the user of master/slave databases nicely. It includes middleware to send POST requests to the master and most GET requests to the slaves effectively making database writes hit the master and database reads pull from the slaves. It also has nice controls to override this default POST/GET switching at the view level and even at the Python coding level. Overall the impression seems very well done.
Python 3.0 Beta 2 released
Python 3.0 is getting closer and closer.
OpenSSH 5.1
OpenSSH 5.1 is out and with some new features, the most interesting of which is an experimental way of displaying SSH host keys as ASCII art.
Django 1.0 alpha 2 released!
Django 1.0 alpha 2 was released and contains some nice updates like GeoDjango, Jython compatability, and pluggable file storage. This is the last alpha before the first beta comes out on August 14th. I'm super excited to see 1.0 land.
Amazon Web Services announces Elastic Block Store (EBS)
EBS removes the scary part of EC2 by providing persistent storage (think virtual hard drives). They can range from 1 GB to 1 TB, offer point in time snapshots (differential backups) saved to S3, lazy loading of existing snapshots, striping across EBS volumes, and probably more I didn't discover. Overall it seems like a nice addition to the rest of the web services.
Novelist Neal Stephenson Once Again Proves He's the King of the Worlds
Excellent article by Steven Levy on Neal Stephenson — in general, and about his upcoming "cinder block", Anathem. Anathem sounds like a very interesting novel and I look forward to reading it.
Using Gmail's SMTP server from Django
Ever since changeset 5144 Django has had the ability to send email directly through Gmail with a few extra settings in your settings.py file. I recently set up a server using Ubuntu and had no intention of receiving email on it, but I did, however, want my website to ...
Hardcore Importing Action
Github.com added direct Subversion importing given a SVN URL (e.g. from Google Code). It handles the "standard" SVN project layout and brings over all history, tags, and branches. It even allows you to set the SVN authors mapping which is slick.
django-html - Google Code
Simon Willison's idea comes alive. django-html has 2 template tags: 1 to set and output a doctype template tag, with a doctype set, the next template tag will output proper HTML tags based on doctype. Brilliant.
A bat on my doorstep
I came home yesterday to a bat hanging out on my front doorstep. It was squawking a little. I snapped a few shots and then it spread its wings and flew away. I don't know enough about bats to know if it was a baby or not.
YouTube - Broadcast Yourself.
This is a Youtube playlist of all the recorded sessions from DjangoCon 2008.
Introducing the Django Debug Toolbar
Genesis
For some time I've been subscribed to the Symfony Project's RSS feed and have enjoyed their weekly summaries and watching another web framework grow. One of the ideas that I found while scanning a particular blog post was their "Web Debug Toolbar". I was inspired and the ...
bitbucket.org
Mercurial hosting site much like GitHub, but with OpenID and issue tracking. Written in Django.
Available!
Dave Merwin is a funny man.
Sending HTML emails to multiple subscribers via Django
I'm going to need this in an upcoming project. Good optimization tips on sending mass emails from Django (e.g. newsletters).
Version Control Makes You A Better Programmer
The thing I liked about this article is how to use DropBox to host git repositories. Interesting idea.
Presenting django-recommender
This brings concepts (and implementation) from the great book, "Programming Collective Intelligence" to Django and provides ways to recommend items based on other user's. Nicely done.
The Unofficial Apple Weblog?
From the iPhone App, "Wurdle". Sadly, this isn't a word and I didn't get any points.
Web Inspector Redesign
The latest WebKit nightly builds include a new Web Inspector. Nice new features include: a console with similar functionality of Firebug, element inspection/toggling/editing, resource pane showing all resources with their latency and HTTP headers, a new Javascript debugger with breakpoints and scope variable viewing, a profiler, and an HTML5 database viewer. Awesome stuff!
Peter Williams - Hypermedia as the Engine of Application State
The right way to do RESTful API versioning.
Philips Designs the 'Light Blossom,' an Intelligent Street Light Concept
Some innovation at the street lamp -- solar panels and wind harnessing to charge during the day, LED light emitting at night.
A Django Management Command for Amazon S3
The Django Commands Extension project, started by Michael Trier, provides some excellent general purpose management commands to your Django projects. Ever since I first found the project I've kept it in the back of my mind that if I ever wrote a useful custom management command, I should contribute ...
The 56, 5 Book Meme
Hackworth had once taken his family out rowing on the pond in the park, and the ends of the yellow oars spun off compact vortices, and Fiona, who had taught herself the physics of liquids through numerous experimental beverage spills and in the bathtub, demanded an explanation for those holes ...
Testing Emails with Django
Django ticket #8638 titled, "Provide setting to disable e-mail sending", caught my eye as an interesting item to look into. As I looked into it, however, I came up with a pretty simple way to set up testing that involves some settings.py changes and about 4 lines of Python ...
New Books
A handful of books that we ordered at work.
Recursion in Django templates | the blog
I've been writing hierarchical navigation menus and such in Python because I didn't think this was possible. Nice to know that if you want recursion, this is an option.
What’s New In Python 3.0
The official docs on what's new in Python 3.0.
Bailey
A new puppy in the house.
Main - browsersec - Google Code - Browser Security Handbook landing page
A one-stop reference to key security properties of contemporary web browsers. Tons of awesome stuff that will take me a long time to read.
Finding Useless Indexes
Josh Berkus shows a how to query your databases to find good candidates for index you can drop, saving space and time on writes.
Writing Efficient CSS
Some guidelines to writing CSS that the browser can parse and match quickly. I had some bad assumptions about many of these, mostly due to the fact that I thought selectors matched left to right, when, in fact, the match from right to left.