Who needs shades of grey?

It's good to re-implement sites. Say it with me, "this time, I'll do it right"

Thu, 23 Dec 2010 10:39:00 +0000

I've been putting off re-writing my girlfriend's website for a while. I made it quite a long time ago, from her Photoshop mockup in PHP. It works, it pulls down RSS feeds from her various blogs and mixes them together. It has no CMS or framework, though, it's all PHP from scratch, and every other month I find some discrepancy in how...

CoffeeScript

Tue, 30 Nov 2010 13:02:00 +0000

It's snowing, and I'm on my nth cup of coffee, and I'm going to talk a little bit about Coffee Script. Full disclosure: I found out about this from a post someone made a while ago over on Forrst...

Learning to use tools that are always available

Sat, 13 Nov 2010 21:43:00 +0000

I recently wrote a tutorial entitled GIMP Fundamentals for Web Developers...

ipdb freely

Sun, 26 Sep 2010 17:43:00 +0000

You know, since starting using Django, there have been a few occasions when I've had to get up and drag someone over to the screen to show them how awesome it is. There's nobody around here tonight. It's a Sunday, I'm at home and I'm enthusiastically bouncy and and the same time slapping my forehead for not thinking something...

Python in my pants.

Tue, 14 Sep 2010 20:03:00 +0000

My Django project deadline went whizzing past. I was stressed about it and have postponed my time off work until I get more of it finished, but I'm less worried now.

Two coders for 5 weeks turned out to be me for five weeks and the other guy for half that because he had a couple of weeks off, and as of now (8 days after the original deadline)...

Django, Centos,

Tue, 27 Jul 2010 19:12:00 +0000

So I've been developing using Django. Long story short: it rocks.
The client uses 1and1 for their hosting, with a dedicated server, and they're happy for me to replace their PHP-driven site with Python. So I decided to do the install early on. Turns out that 1and1 (who are one of the crappiest hosting providers I've ever used) mean a...

Django is my future

Fri, 09 Jul 2010 08:25:00 +0000

I only know the rudiments of python. But I want to diversify the hell out of my PHP-ridden career. I've investigated, listened to friends and colleagues and twiddled with knobs, and have decided to do my next project in python, by way of django.

I want to get away from PHP because I feel it typecasts me as that particular breed of programmer....

Passwords and that annoying CAPSLOCK problem.

Sun, 13 Jun 2010 19:27:00 +0000

There is nothing I'm more interested in than usability, unless it's security. Or something else if it's shiny. So I'm going to talk about all of these things.
You're familiar with users typing in their passwords and not being let onto a site because they unfortunately forgot they had caps lock enabled. The scenarios for can be...

Internet Explorer is my bi-atch.

Thu, 20 May 2010 12:38:00 +0000

So in real browsers, if you bind something to an element's click event, your handler returns false in order to stop the even bubbling. It's fairly simple.
In jQuery, for example,

$('a.thingy').click(function(){   // do something   return false'});

...

"Free" as in "whatever, dude"

Sun, 09 May 2010 08:53:00 +0000

Something that comes up quite frequently in the middle of software discussions is the problem of differentiating between free and non-free software.

It's a problem because most people have an opinion and dismiss everyone else's as unimportant. The difference *is* important - however, it's difficult to get the point across especially...