Published February 25, 2008
In the triumphant return of “James answers questions from the django-users list”, today I’d like to take a few moments to talk something that’s recently become something of a hot topic, spawning not one but two threads, as well as a couple off-list email discussions: what, exactly, is appropriate to put into a method on a custom manager as opposed to, say, a class method, and when and how can you tell?
This is a somewhat tricky question to answer, since there’s a substantial grey area where ...
Published February 19, 2008
Once again, with apologies to John Gruber…
Q: Do standards-based developers have to use X-UA-Compatible if they care about progressive enhancement for future browsers?
A: As I see it, yes.
Q: Doesn’t Internet Explorer already offer a fine-grained way to target specific versions?
A: Yes, definitely.
Q: So if there was a problem with the IE6 to IE7 transition, doesn’t that mean people weren’t properly using an existing tool which could have future-proofed their sites?
A: You may rely on it.
Q: Given that, is it likely ...
Published February 19, 2008
It’s sad to reach the point where “epic fail” is the most apt term I can come up with to describe an article by Zeldman, but that’s where I am today. His article “Version Targeting: Threat or Menace?” in today’s ALA is so far off the mark that, honestly, I can’t come up with any other description.
No, Microsoft is not relevant anymore.
No, the default behavior is not correct.
No, the switch does not solve the problems the IE team claims to be fighting.
No ...
Published February 11, 2008
Mark Ramm has a nice post this morning talking about Adam Gomaa’s discussion of “conceptual integrity” in Python web frameworks; I think it’s worth a read.
The key point Mark touches on is good documentation: ensuring that people see and understand the overarching structure of the framework is, ultimately, the key to helping people understand how it can help them get their work done. In the case of Django there is an official “overview” document, but it’s really not as good as it could be; it’s ...
Published February 10, 2008
Between normal work, working on the book, working on my upcoming PyCon talk and working on a couple little things on the side, I haven’t had much time for blogging lately, especially about Django. But I’ve built up a collection of little things that need to get posted, so I’m just going to start dumping them out here and then get back to not having any free time :)
django-registration updateI’ve bumped django-registration up to version 0.4p2; the new package doesn’t add any ...
Published February 7, 2008
As of sometime this weekend when the DNS change propagated, all static/media files for this site migrated over to Amazon’s S3 storage service; when I relaunched back in September, media was coming off a Joyent BingoDisk account. While a change in media serving technology really isn’t all that sexy or exciting compared to some aspects of web development (or as popular as writing about whatever Microsoft is doing today), I’d like to take a moment to talk about this move, why I decided to go with ...