And Yet Another Remodel

Published on March 19, 2008 under Tech Blog

I have finally decided to do another remodel of this site. I had a few goals before starting: Use one image Use the YUI-CSS framework Use Django Make it easily extendable So far, I think I've accomplished these goals. The site is easier to read, easy to ... Read more.

Mass Spam Delete Django

Published on Oct. 2, 2007 under Tech Blog

As you can read, I've been traveling around quite a bit lately. This means I haven't been checking the comments on my blog, which means quite a bit of spam has been entered. I am blocking the spam via akismet, however, it is still recorded in the database. Being somebody ... Read more.

Adding Search to Django

Published on June 3, 2007 under Tech Blog

This is fairly well documented in the Django docs, so I'll be brief. This is the the bit of search code I use in almost all of my Django sites, and it works great: def search(request): from django.db.models import Q <span ... Read more.

Django Syndication with Colddirt

Published on June 3, 2007 under Tech Blog

Creating feeds in Django is freaking simple. I'll start with an example of just updating a feed with the newest objects (for instace, newest blog posts). Similar to the forms.py way of handling our different forms, I've created a feeds.py to handle the feeds. feeds.py from django.contrib.syndication.feeds <span ... Read more.

Django Syndication with Colddirt II

Published on June 3, 2007 under Tech Blog

Since I've already covered a really simple syndication example, I'll move onto something a little more complex. Let's say you want to offer syndication that is slightly more custom. The Django syndication docs give an example from Adrian's Chicagocrime.org syndication of beats. I had to ponder a ... Read more.

Django Newforms Usage in Colddirt

Published on June 1, 2007 under Tech Blog

I hear many complaints and questions about newforms, but I've personally found it rather easy and logical to use. There are numerous ways for you to use do forms in Django, and most likely the best way to see them all is to read the docs. On the Colddirt ... Read more.

Simple Ajax with Django

Published on June 1, 2007 under Tech Blog

So, the Django developers, in my opinion, are freaking smart. Instead of bundling Django with a particular library, they have added XML and JSON serialization; us humble users can choose whatever AJAX library we want. Prototype 1.5.1 has been pretty fun to work with, so I'll kick off this ... Read more.

Colddirt Information

Published on May 29, 2007 under Tech Blog

I wrote up the majority of this on a Friday night, so cut me a tad bit of slack:) Feel free to take a glance at the entire source. NoteColddirt's source code is run from Django SVN, check out on May 10th-ish. If you are using a newer branch, ... Read more.

Django SVN Update Goes Splat

Published on May 9, 2007 under Tech Blog

I'm writing this just in case somebody runs into this same issue. I'm about to go live with a website and figured it would be best to have the latest SVN snapshot checked out from Django. I updated, and noticed that my voting module didn't quite work as expected. I ... Read more.

Version 3.0 Part Two

Published on Feb. 5, 2007 under Tech Blog

Well, I'm basically all done upgrading to Version 3.0, I deserve a cake or something. Here's the 411: For the past few years I have been using Mambo, then Joomla, to manage the content on my site. It worked quite well, and was in PHP, so I could add or ... Read more.

Alexa Site Thumbnail with Python II

Published on June 6, 2007 under Notes and Tutorials

This is how I actually use Alexa Site Thumbnail, and since I'min a sharing mood, I'll extend the code your way. In short, this takes the url and searches in STORELOC first, then any urls not already in STORELOC are retrieved and named via a slug. You need to pass ... Read more.