The B-List: Latest entrieshttp://www.b-list.org/feeds/entries/2008-12-04T02:14:26ZJames BennettGeneric inlines and Django history2008-12-04T02:14:26ZJames Bennetthttp://www.b-list.org/tag:www.b-list.org,2008-12-04:/weblog/2008/dec/04/generic-inlines/
<p>The other day at work I stumbled across my first opportunity to use a relatively-new feature in the Django admin, one which turned what had looked like it would be a fairly nasty task into, basically, a five-minute job (plus staging, testing and deployment, of course, but that happens no matter how long it takes to develop the code). I’ll get to the specifics in a minute, but first I want to give a ...</p>
<p><a href="http://www.b-list.org/weblog/2008/dec/04/generic-inlines/">Read full entry and comments</a></p><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/b-list-entries/~4/474446395" height="1" width="1"/>http://www.b-list.org/about/copyright/Another take on content negotiation2008-11-29T20:24:39ZJames Bennetthttp://www.b-list.org/tag:www.b-list.org,2008-11-29:/weblog/2008/nov/29/multiresponse/
<p>Today my co-worker Daniel posted <a href="http://toastdriven.com/fresh/multiresponse/">a class which performs content negotiation for Django views</a>, allowing you to write a single view which returns any of several types of responses (e.g., <acronym title="HyperText Markup Language"><span class="caps">HTML</span></acronym>, <acronym title="JavaScript Object Notation"><span class="caps">JSON</span></acronym>, <acronym title="eXtensible Markup Language"><span class="caps">XML</span></acronym>) according to the incoming <acronym title="HyperText Transfer Protocol"><span class="caps">HTTP</span></acronym> <code>Accept</code> header. While it’s certainly cool, he notes a couple of issues with it (including the redundancy it introduces in <acronym title="Uniform Resource Locator"><span class="caps">URL</span></acronym> configuration).
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<p>So let’s see if we can’t come up with a way ...</p>
<p><a href="http://www.b-list.org/weblog/2008/nov/29/multiresponse/">Read full entry and comments</a></p><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/b-list-entries/~4/469873803" height="1" width="1"/>http://www.b-list.org/about/copyright/Writing custom management commands2008-11-14T19:35:12ZJames Bennetthttp://www.b-list.org/tag:www.b-list.org,2008-11-14:/weblog/2008/nov/14/management-commands/
<p>The other night in the <code>#django-dev</code> <acronym title="Internet Relay Chat"><span class="caps">IRC</span></acronym> channel, <a href="http://cecinestpasun.com/">Russ</a>, <a href="http://ericholscher.com/">Eric</a> and I were talking about <a href="http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/howto/custom-management-commands/#howto-custom-management-commands">custom management commands</a> for certain types of common but tedious tasks; Eric was discussing the possibility of a command for automatically generating a <code>tests</code> module in a Django application, since he’s our resident unit-testing freak, and I started toying with the idea of one to generate basic <a href="http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/ref/contrib/admin/">admin declarations</a> for the models in an application.
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<p>So I sat down ...</p>
<p><a href="http://www.b-list.org/weblog/2008/nov/14/management-commands/">Read full entry and comments</a></p><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/b-list-entries/~4/453566813" height="1" width="1"/>http://www.b-list.org/about/copyright/So you want a dynamic form2008-11-09T03:59:55ZJames Bennetthttp://www.b-list.org/tag:www.b-list.org,2008-11-09:/weblog/2008/nov/09/dynamic-forms/
<p>So I havent really been doing much writing lately. That’s mostly a consequence of the fact that:
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Django 1.0 was released, and meeting the schedule for that took up an enormous amount of time.
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After that, there was DjangoCon.
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Oh, and there are all sorts of things in my life, including a book, a gigantic codebase and dozens of sites, which all need to be updated. Our entire team here in Lawrence has ...</li></ol>
<p><a href="http://www.b-list.org/weblog/2008/nov/09/dynamic-forms/">Read full entry and comments</a></p><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/b-list-entries/~4/447279330" height="1" width="1"/>http://www.b-list.org/about/copyright/What's next?2008-11-05T04:00:19ZJames Bennetthttp://www.b-list.org/tag:www.b-list.org,2008-11-05:/weblog/2008/nov/05/obama/
<p>What happened today:
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<blockquote><p>Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress: but no Senator or Representative, or Person holding an Office of Trust or Profit under the United States, shall be appointed an Elector.
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</blockquote><p>What happens next:
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<blockquote><p>The Electors shall meet in their respective states, and vote ...</p></blockquote>
<p><a href="http://www.b-list.org/weblog/2008/nov/05/obama/">Read full entry and comments</a></p><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/b-list-entries/~4/443080663" height="1" width="1"/>http://www.b-list.org/about/copyright/Slides2008-09-07T11:41:15ZJames Bennetthttp://www.b-list.org/tag:www.b-list.org,2008-09-07:/weblog/2008/sep/07/slides/
<p>I’m sitting here in Building 40 at Google, waiting for this morning’s first <a href="http://djangocon.org/">DjangoCon</a> keynote to start, and getting ready for the Django technical design panel which comes immediately afterward. Naturally, I’m taking advantage of the down time (and Google’s bandwidth) to upload my slides from yesterday’s talk. If you’ve seen/read the slides from <a href="/weblog/2008/mar/15/slides/">the version of this talk I gave at PyCon</a>, I can tell you that ...</p>
<p><a href="http://www.b-list.org/weblog/2008/sep/07/slides/">Read full entry and comments</a></p><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/b-list-entries/~4/385908812" height="1" width="1"/>http://www.b-list.org/about/copyright/Database heresies2008-08-04T01:40:35ZJames Bennetthttp://www.b-list.org/tag:www.b-list.org,2008-08-04:/weblog/2008/aug/04/orm/
<p>While scanning reddit, I saw an article pop up by Jeff Davis <a href="http://people.planetpostgresql.org/jdavis/index.php?/archives/8-Why-DBMSs-are-so-complex.html#extended">lamenting the way most people interact with databases</a>, particularly when it comes to <acronym title="Object-Relational Mapper"><span class="caps">ORM</span></acronym>s. Jeff seems to be pointing out (and, to an extent, conflating) two issues:
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At the moment, programming languages and <span class="caps">SQL</span> don’t really mesh all that well.
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Most people, in Jeff’s opinion, take the wrong approach to working with a database from their programming language of choice ...</li></ol>
<p><a href="http://www.b-list.org/weblog/2008/aug/04/orm/">Read full entry and comments</a></p><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/b-list-entries/~4/355258758" height="1" width="1"/>http://www.b-list.org/about/copyright/Let's talk about DVCS2008-07-28T07:03:28ZJames Bennetthttp://www.b-list.org/tag:www.b-list.org,2008-07-28:/weblog/2008/jul/28/lets-talk-about-dvcs/
<p>So, a few years ago all the cool kids were switching from <span class="caps">CVS</span> to Subversion. These days, all the cool kids are switching from Subversion to some form of distributed version control; git and Mercurial seem to be the ones with the largest market shares. This switch is being accompanied by a simply <em>deafening</em> amount of hype about <span class="caps">DVCS</span> and how it’s a revolutionary new paradigm and will completely change the way people work ...</p>
<p><a href="http://www.b-list.org/weblog/2008/jul/28/lets-talk-about-dvcs/">Read full entry and comments</a></p><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/b-list-entries/~4/348345781" height="1" width="1"/>http://www.b-list.org/about/copyright/Microformats and such2008-06-29T02:41:41ZJames Bennetthttp://www.b-list.org/tag:www.b-list.org,2008-06-29:/weblog/2008/jun/29/microformats-and-such/
<p>I hope you’ll forgive this brief diversion from my ongoing attempt to distinguish web developers from web designers, but it’s late, I’ve had a couple beers and I’ve been tinkering a bit with some code. Regularly-scheduled programming will return shortly.
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<p>So. <a href="http://diveintomark.org/archives/2008/06/29/microformats-accessibility">The microformats people and the accessibility people are at war with each other</a>, or so it seems (remember to read that article with tongue firmly in cheek). The cause of ...</p>
<p><a href="http://www.b-list.org/weblog/2008/jun/29/microformats-and-such/">Read full entry and comments</a></p><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/b-list-entries/~4/322455544" height="1" width="1"/>http://www.b-list.org/about/copyright/Designers and developers: FIGHT!2008-06-26T14:36:07ZJames Bennetthttp://www.b-list.org/tag:www.b-list.org,2008-06-26:/weblog/2008/jun/26/fight/
<p>In a thorough and well-thought-out article published on Tuesday, Andy Rutledge <a href="http://www.andyrutledge.com/the-employable-web-designer.php">listed what he considers to be the essential skills and knowledge for a web designer</a>; this list is notable not only for what it includes — namely, a masterful distillation of just what it is that a web designer should be able to do — but also for what it explicitly excludes:
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<blockquote><p>Note also that nowhere in this list do the words “Photoshop,” “Illustrator,” “Dreamweaver,” or ...</p></blockquote>
<p><a href="http://www.b-list.org/weblog/2008/jun/26/fight/">Read full entry and comments</a></p><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/b-list-entries/~4/320771795" height="1" width="1"/>http://www.b-list.org/about/copyright/Media and performance2008-06-23T07:10:49ZJames Bennetthttp://www.b-list.org/tag:www.b-list.org,2008-06-23:/weblog/2008/jun/23/media/
<p>Ever since last September when I moved this site off the shared-hosting account which had been handling it from its initial launch, I’ve been using separate services to handle static files — “media” in common Django parlance — instead of using the same web server instance, or a separate instance running on the same physical server as the rest of the site. Specifically, I’m using <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/browse.html?node=16427261">Amazon S3</a>.
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<p>When I first <a href="/weblog/2008/feb/07/media/">explained this</a> a few months ...</p>
<p><a href="http://www.b-list.org/weblog/2008/jun/23/media/">Read full entry and comments</a></p><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/b-list-entries/~4/318077728" height="1" width="1"/>http://www.b-list.org/about/copyright/Things I have learned about XHTML2008-06-21T19:59:44ZJames Bennetthttp://www.b-list.org/tag:www.b-list.org,2008-06-21:/weblog/2008/jun/21/xhtml/
<p>The following are gleaned from the comments to <a href="/weblog/2008/jun/18/html/">my recent explanation</a> of why I chose to use <acronym title="HyperText Markup Language"><span class="caps">HTML</span></acronym> 4.01 Strict for my redesign, rather than a flavor of <acronym title="eXtensible HyperText Markup Language"><span class="caps">XHTML</span></acronym>, an explanation in which I mostly boiled the debate — for my needs, here on this site — down to “<span class="caps">XHTML</span> doesn’t offer me any compelling advantage, and it’s more complex to do right than most people know/admit”.
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<p>Advance warning: yes, this is snarky ...</p>
<p><a href="http://www.b-list.org/weblog/2008/jun/21/xhtml/">Read full entry and comments</a></p><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/b-list-entries/~4/317166415" height="1" width="1"/>http://www.b-list.org/about/copyright/Let's talk about documentation2008-06-21T03:18:30ZJames Bennetthttp://www.b-list.org/tag:www.b-list.org,2008-06-21:/weblog/2008/jun/21/documentation/
<p><a href="http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/info/6o8s7/comments/">One of the most active threads</a> on reddit’s programming section right now discusses things people look for when reviewing someone else’s code; <a href="http://www.noop.nl/2008/04/the-perfect-job.html">the article being discussed</a> treats this as a great interview question and points to things like algorithm choices and object-oriented design as good responses. While these are important considerations, I’ve found I tend to make snap judgments long before I get to that level of analysis, and they’re almost ...</p>
<p><a href="http://www.b-list.org/weblog/2008/jun/21/documentation/">Read full entry and comments</a></p><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/b-list-entries/~4/316769711" height="1" width="1"/>http://www.b-list.org/about/copyright/Fun with queryset-refactor2008-06-19T22:15:04ZJames Bennetthttp://www.b-list.org/tag:www.b-list.org,2008-06-19:/weblog/2008/jun/19/qsrf/
<p>Mixed in with my recent redesign and server move, I’ve taken the opportunity to update the Django trunk snapshot this site runs on; generally I snapshot a week or two after a big change, once I’ve had time to see any major bugs shake out and update <a href="/about/colophon/">the various applications I use</a>. This time around the recent big change was <a href="http://code.djangoproject.com/wiki/QuerysetRefactorBranch">the queryset-refactor branch</a> landing in trunk. Most people have been focusing obsessively on ...</p>
<p><a href="http://www.b-list.org/weblog/2008/jun/19/qsrf/">Read full entry and comments</a></p><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/b-list-entries/~4/315906617" height="1" width="1"/>http://www.b-list.org/about/copyright/Why HTML2008-06-18T01:14:02ZJames Bennetthttp://www.b-list.org/tag:www.b-list.org,2008-06-18:/weblog/2008/jun/18/html/
<p>So, as I let the dust settle from <a href="/weblog/2008/jun/15/minimal/">the most controversial changes I made in the redesign</a> (and tweak some things and watch my stats in response to the constructive feedback I’ve gotten), I’d like to address the <em>other</em> big change that people have been asking about: why I switched (switched <em>back</em>, actually) from <acronym title="eXtensible HyperText Markup Language"><span class="caps">XHTML</span></acronym> 1.0 to <acronym title="HyperText Markup Language"><span class="caps">HTML</span></acronym> 4.01.
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<p>The short and sweet reason is simply this: <span class="caps">XHTML</span> offers no compelling ...</p>
<p><a href="http://www.b-list.org/weblog/2008/jun/18/html/">Read full entry and comments</a></p><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/b-list-entries/~4/314394199" height="1" width="1"/>http://www.b-list.org/about/copyright/