One nice thing about Django is that unlike many frameworks, you do not have to “grok” the whole thing to be productive. In my case, I hadn’t read a lot of the documentation other than the tutorial and the details of a few of the features I need for my first app. So, imagine my happy surprise when I found the very nicely implemented “documentation” link in the automatically generated admin site.
Django is pulling ahead of every other web framework I’ve tried. For reference, that includes such recent heavy-hitters as: Jakarta Struts/Tiles, Spring, PHP Smarty, Zope, and Plone.
I’d been thinking about why that was so, why I’ve become so fond of Django so quickly, when I ran across a post at Jacobian.org, titled Why you […]
I read some research lately which seems to show that keywords matter to search engines in your site’s “title” tag. Not only that, but position matters. Preferably your page title should precede your site title.Unfortunately Wordpress is coded to make that sort of ugly.
Tags: Plugins · Wordpress · Downloads
Installing Cheetah on Dreamhost’s shared servers is actually a snap.
fvlogger.js is a fine logging system for Javascript, but when you are already using Prototype.js, it unnecessarily duplicates a lot of functionality. I’ve forked the original code to “fvlogger 1.0.proto”, removing this duplication.
Tags: Libraries · CSS · Open Source · Javascript · Downloads
One thing I just don’t understand is why more people, especially framework designers, omit or skip logging. Django appears to, which is incredibly annoying to me. It is a complex framework, which makes all kinds of assumptions and relies on convention to infer a lot of functionality. That’s great, but being able […]
Tags: Best Practices · Rants · Django · Python
Recently, I’ve been something of a language evangelist at work. I’ve been promoting the power and utility of Python and Javascript to both coworkers and management. One thing I’ve found difficult to get across to them is the concept of "Closures", and why the lack of Closures in many mainstream languages (such as […]
Tags: Python · Javascript
I’ve long agreed with the point made over at ongoing about the XML Languages. Most are poorly considered ideas, entered into without understanding the enormous scope of the task. Most duplicate functionality rather than extending or utilizing something already existing and understood by millions of people and programs.
It is the famous Not Invented […]
Smart Money Daily points out a great resource for website usability guidelines. Created by the US national cancer institute, it gives more than simple “give img tags ‘alt’ attributes’. Instead, it goes into why you should do so, and even more importantly, what evidence there is that this is an important guideline for […]
Tags: Design
Two simple links which have been very helpful in doing my inital Django project.
1) The Dreamhost installation guide on the DH wiki.
2) The Django project template utility, which sets up new projects and all the assorted config files to a much greater degree than the built-in django-admin.py utility. I’ve added a couple more templated […]