Done, and gets things smart.
There are moments when the lightbulb goes off in your head with the power of a thousand white-hot suns. For me, it happened while I was reading the WordPress Database Schema back to back with Henri Bergius’s highly influentials (well, it was a Hell of an influence on me, at any rate) Decoupling Content Management. Take a close […]
I’ll hang my head in shame later. So, I wrote this for my wife, it’s a hack on the “recent_posts” function from default-widgets.php, which comes with WordPress. It’s magic is that it scans each post for an IMG tag and, if it finds one, inserts that as the background of the list object. A little […]
10Jul
Posted by Elf Sternberg as programming, web development
In my previous post, I described a simple routine for using grunt, mocha, and zombie to unit test HTML and Javascript web applications, even those written with abstractions like Coffeescript, Less, or HAML, with a certain degree of verisimilitude. The key elements were (a) use grunt to build the various components, then (b) use grunt […]
28Apr
Posted by Elf Sternberg as Design, web development
I love LessCSS, because it allows me to write CSS as code, with consistent thinking throughout. Today, I’m going to show you how to have button-shaped anchors with consistent gradients throughout your page, using the color scheme you’ve initially chosen. LessCSS allows you to have parameterized mixins, small blocks of CSS that you can easily […]
I learned an important lesson today: never put on hold a book from the library that’s already listed on the shelves. Just go get it. If it’s on hold, they’ll take it off the shelves and put it “into the system,” which means you won’t actually be able to get it for 24 hours. I […]
06Oct
Posted by Elf Sternberg as django, python, web development
Hot on the heels of my last entry, the next utility is needed to extend the event object to automatically produce a URL compatible with Google Calendar’s “create an event” handler. Now, I could extend the Event application myself and add a get_google_url() method to the model, but let’s try to do this The Django […]
I love being able to combine one of my favorite design techniques with my latest infatuation. It makes my hair tingle. “Gamification,” as any buzzword-compliant high-priced consultant will tell you, is the process of adding game mechanics to a website in the desperate hope that trivial reward mechanisms– badges, stickers, and made-up titles straight out […]
18Aug
Posted by Elf Sternberg as django, web development
I searched for “django gearman” on Google and Bing, and found precious little. There isn’t much out there, so I’ve decided to put together my own example, using Gearman as a queue manager. If you don’t know what Gearman is, it’s a “generic application framework to farm out work to other machines or processes that […]
11Aug
Posted by Elf Sternberg as web development
Oh, what a surprise! Firefox implements the HTML5 “article” tag as display: inline, and Chrome implements it as display:block. How annoying. Well, it’s a simple CSS setting to make it work as expected. (Edit: I see, as always, A List Apart is way ahead of me on this. By almost a year!)
I learned today how to enable ReCaptcha for Django. It’s fairly trivial. I’ll show you how to enable this for account registration. First, go and create a key pair for your site. You don’t even have to give them an email address, which is nice. Install the recaptcha client library on your site: pip install […]