Post archive

Post a day in review

2008 November 30

It's the end of the Post a day for a month. I did pretty well, but fell off about 3 weeks in because of work. First some stats.

Post stats

In [4]: Post.objects.published().filter(publish__year='2008', publish__month='11').count()
Out[4]: 23L

In [10]: for post in ...

The value of conventions, aka testmaker for template tags.

2008 November 27

A couple posts ago, I talked about how we should have conventions for the names that we use in Django Template Blocks. Today I will be talking about the value that is gained from this kind of structure.

Use Cases

Template Tags ...

Testmaker 0.2: Rewritten and improved

2008 November 26

About a week ago, I went ahead and re-wrote testmaker and moved it into my django-test-utils project on github. The syntax is now a bit different, and the whole thing is much improved. This is version 0 ...

Django Aggregator v2 now has tagging, and you should too.

2008 November 22

I have been doing some more work on my Django Community Aggregator / Django People v2 project. A big feature that I want to incorporate is tagging. I want people to be able to sort data by tag, among other things. I think that this is a pretty killer feature.

This ...

Luck and a New Life in Lawrence

2008 November 21

Note: This isn't a technical post. If you don't want to be getting posts like this, you can sign up for just my Django feed. This is my personal blog, so stuff like this pops up from time to time :).

Most people believe ...

Gentlemans agreement on Django templates

2008 November 20

There are a lot of reusable apps out in the Django Ecosystem. I wrote a previous post about why I think that reusable apps should come with templates. There is a problem about distributing templates that I want to address with this ...

Busy Busy

2008 November 17

So at work since I started for Mediaphormedia, currently World Online, and the birthplace of Django, I have been tasked with porting Ellington. Ellington is the CMS that we create and sell, and is what Django originally was. Django was pulled out of ...

A start to the uber community

2008 November 16

Well I spent all day Saturday, and all night. Into Sunday morning hacking on some code. Probably the most productive 24 hours of my life. I have a couple of announcements, but in the spirit of post-a-day, I'll spread them out over a couple days :).

The big one, is ...

Debugging Django in Production Environments

2008 November 15

Nick had a nice post about setting DEBUG based on the hostname of the server that you're site is running on. This allows you to set DEBUG to True for your staging site, and False for your production site.

I do something along ...

Should reusable apps have templates?

2008 November 14

There is a debate among the Django community about whether people should include templates in their reusable apps.

The arguments for including them are generally that it is nice to simply install the app and have things just work. This is a really nice feature to not have to dig ...

Encouraging Testing in Django

2008 November 13

I was having a conversation with Jacob tonight about testing in Django. He has shot down testmaker for being too specific for Django core, which I almost agree with, given my grandiose plans for it before the month is out ...

The importance of not deleting blog posts (read: ideas)

2008 November 12

A lot of the time I start a blog post as a sentence. It is something that strikes me and I don't really know what I think about it. It is a moment of thought that needs to be revisited, but cannot yet be expounded upon.

A while ago ...

Practical Django Testing Examples: Views

2008 November 11

This is the fourth in a series of Django testing posts. Check out the others in my Testing series if you want to read more. Today is the start of a sub-series, which is practical examples. This series will be going through each of the different kinds of ...

Announcing Django Crawler and django-test-utils

2008 November 10

Today I'm going to be releasing a new project, called django-test-utils. It's rather empty at the moment, but it does have one cool feature. That is my [Django Crawler](http://github.com/ericholscher/django-test-utils/tree/master/test_utils/management/commands/crawlurls.py ...

The times, they are a changin

2008 November 09

A couple posts back, I was talking about software that I use all the time. I was going through and linking to all of the software. I would go to google, type in the project name, go to the first result, and copy that URL back into my post. I ...

The problem with Django's Template Tags

2008 November 08

There are a lot of things that I love about Django. Template tags are one of them. However, they do have a couple of warts that bother me. I know that there's a problem when I actively look for another way to accomplish something instead of writing a template ...

Software that I use: Essentials 2008

2008 November 07

Stealing an idea/meme from Mark Pilgrim I'm going to do a post of the essential software that I use in a day to day basis. Justin also did a similar post a couple ...

Making a Django Uber-Community

2008 November 06

My workload at work is about to get a lot less critical and time consuming, so I was looking for a project to start on. I am really interested in the social aspects of the web, and below I will outline an idea that I think will be my next ...

Introduction to Python/Django tests: Fixtures

2008 November 05

In the first two posts of this series, we talked about how to get the basic infrastructure for your tests up and running. You should have a file with doc tests and one with unit tests. They should be linked into your django project with an `init.py ...

Introduction to Python/Django testing: Basic Unit Tests

2008 November 04

Last post we talked about how to set up and use doc tests inside of Django. Today, in the second post of the series, we'll be talking about how to use the other testing framework that comes with Python, unittest. unittest is a xUnit type of testing system (JUnit ...

Python gems of my own

2008 November 03

Note: I'm launching a redesign today to address the styling issues. Please bear with me

A great example of how this month of blog posting is spawning great content on the interwebs. Other Eric posted a gems of python post, in which he ...

Introduction to Python/Django testing: Basic Doctests

2008 November 02

This is the first in a series of blog posts and screencasts that will walk you through how to test your Django application. These posts will focus more on how to get things done in Django, but note that a lot of the content is applicable to pure python as ...

A blog post a day keeps the doctor away

2008 November 01

November blog posting month has a special moment in my Django history. It was this time last year that I really got serious into Django. With the help of James Bennett's and Marty Alchin's blog ...