Coder’s Eye

A site about one of the three passions in my life.

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Entries Tagged as 'Tips'

How To Kill nasty Word Garbage Characters in your CMS

January 9th, 2008 · No Comments

Recently I was doing a server move for a client. From an ancient slow system costing her too much money (and me too much bother dealing with a know-it-all-wrong admin) at Today.net, to a nice modern VPS reliably, competently and fully managed by LiquidWeb.
Last year, I wrote her a travel reservation & quoting app in […]

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Tags: Tips · Macintosh

Django and Lighttpd configuration for smooth SSL

August 10th, 2007 · 3 Comments

I use and prefer Lighttpd for serving my Django applications. Tonight I worked out a nearly perfect configuration which allows me to serve the app through fastcgi in both http, and SSL-enabled https. The media files are directly served by Lighty, without hitting the django backend at all, for maximum speed.
Better yet, this […]

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Tags: Hosting · Tips · Django

Cross-browser safe, readable Javascript style

July 12th, 2007 · No Comments

Over time and thousands of lines of professional Javascript programming, I’ve developed an almost bulletproof Javascript layout style. It is important to have one, even if you are the only person working on your script, because:

it helps you read the code more quickly
it helps you not forget browser "gotchas"
it makes your code more reusable […]

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Tags: Tips · Javascript

Fixing Exim sender callout error

June 6th, 2007 · 1 Comment

On my new dedicated server, I’ve been getting reports of mail bounces. Looking more closely at them, I found they said “451: Deferred sender callout cannot be verified.”This is the result of an anti-spam measure that Cpanel enables by default for Exim.

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Tags: Hosting · Tips

Mass Import Yojimbo Passwords

May 12th, 2007 · No Comments

I searched all over the place last night and I couldn’t find anything that could import passwords into Yojimbo for me. I did see a lot of complaining about the lack of ability to do so, however.
Since I really like the app in most ways except for its lame import capabilities, I whipped one […]

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Tags: Tips · Open Source · Macintosh · Python

Tricky Drupal Javascript Loading Problem

May 7th, 2007 · No Comments

A short tale about squashing a bug.
You see, my mistrust for IE made me miss the real problem. What was happening was that in IE 7 on Vista, a site I’m building for a client was not loading any Javascript. It wasn’t even loading the base Javascript "jquery.js" and "drupal.js", so my site […]

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Tags: Drupal · Tips

Django auto_now Removal Gotcha

May 6th, 2007 · 2 Comments

The latest Django revisions have removed the shortcut handlers "auto_now&quot and "auto_now_add". This didn’t look like a very big deal to replace.

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Tags: Tips · Django · Python

VPN Client for Vista using Parallels

April 23rd, 2007 · No Comments

A recent client needed me to run some Windows-only software from their network.

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Tags: Tips · Macintosh · Downloads

Lighttpd on Cpanel VPS

March 28th, 2007 · 11 Comments

Working on a new project for a client, I need to run Django/Satchmo.

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Tags: Domains · Hosting · Best Practices · Tips

Enhancing FAQs with jQuery

March 8th, 2007 · 4 Comments

I’m so pleased by how useful and concise jQuery has been for my development of a dynamic FAQ module for Drupal. I can’t share that module yet, but I can talk about the jQuery that gives it a snappy and useful facelift.
It isn’t original, of course. Just click-to-toggle questions on a faq page. […]

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Tags: Tips · Javascript