Surfing in Kansas

Enable setup.py test in your Django apps

2009 June 29

Setuptools comes with a way to run the tests on your application. This allows the user of your software to download it, and run python setup.py test and check to see if the tests in your application pass. This is really useful ...

Migrating Django Test Fixtures Using South

2009 June 11

The Problem

Migrating test fixtures is one of the biggest pains of testing. If you create your tests too early, then change your schema, you have to go back and touch all your old test fixtures. This discourages people from writing tests until their app is relatively 'stable'. As we ...

A playground for Django Template tags and filters

2009 May 24

The Problem

Any sufficiently large Django project starts to have a wide variety of Template Tags and Filters. Even Django ships with a dizzying array of them that allow you to do all sorts of fun and interesting things. Ellington, our CMS at work, has a ton, and I've ...

EuroDjangoCon Talk: Testing Django

2009 May 05

Just got off the stage at EuroDjangocon, which was my first real talk in front of the Django Community. I hope that people enjoyed it, and that it was informational. Here are the slides to my talk in [PDF Form](http://media.ericholscher.com/slides/Testing ...

Django's Summer of Code students announced!

2009 April 20

Today is the day that Google has announced the accepted projects for the Summer of Code. Django has 6 spots this year, with a bunch of exciting projects. I am lucky enough to be mentoring Kevin Kubasik with his project "Upgrade the Awesomness Quotient of the ...

Testing AJAX Views in Django

2009 April 16

A lot of the Django code we use at work has a special case for AJAX. It has been a kind of a pain to test, because the test client by default doesn't use AJAX. Luckily the [is_ajax](http://code.djangoproject.com/browser/django/trunk/django/http/init.py ...

Adding Google Analytics to Sphinx Docs

2009 April 05

This is just a reminder for myself later, or people looking on Google. Also note, that this method is useful for putting any Javascript content into your sphinx docs, but Analytics tracking is a common use case.

Step 1: Where to put my files?

Check your conf.py on your ...

Really easy SSH tunneling

2009 March 21

SSH Tunneling has become an invaluable tool that I probably use more than I should. I love tunneling, and use it all the time. This will be a quick tutorial on how to use the SOCKS proxy ability of SSH to allow you to tunnel your HTTP traffic through a ...

Twitter Spam

2009 March 15

I keep hearing people talking about how twitter is going to be over run with spam now that it is becoming mainstream. I really don't understand this viewpoint, and will take time here to outline what they could be talking about, and what can be done.

This is in ...

Google Summer of Code

2009 March 12

It's that time of year again, and the Google Summer of Code is happening again. This year Django will be applying again, and there is currently a Wiki page on the Django wiki devoted to ideas and people ...

Pycon and Euro Djangocon

2009 March 08

The ice is starting to thaw and I'm making my way out from under my first winter in Kansas. You know that spring is coming because the conference season is starting to bloom. I'm looking forward to a bunch of conferences that will be upcoming in the new ...

Automatically apply patches from Django's (or any) Trac

2009 February 28

Lately I've been delving into Django development a bit more, and applying people's patches has been a bit of a hassle. You know you want to apply someones patch, but there are about five steps in between you and applying their patch to your source tree.

So I ...

Incredibly useful SSH flag

2009 February 15

So at work we have a lot of different django environments, scattered across varies servers. All of this information is kept in a central resource. We have the pythonpath, settings file, and the remote server that the client is on. So every time that I want to go do work ...

Using rsync with django

2009 January 29

Just a quick warning/tip on using Django with rsync, for other people pulling their hair out later.

When you use rsync a good way to get a directory is using rsync -aCq, which means recursively, quietly, move a directory ignoring common files. The -a command means 'archive'; keep permissions ...

Django Conventions Project Update

2009 January 27

So about a month ago I started a project on my blog called the Django Conventions Project. It was an attempt to document and record conventions that are used across the community. Conventions are a great thing ...

Encouraging Web Interaction for University Students

2009 January 22

So today I would like to tell a story that really shows why the internet is an amazing thing. This month's articles on A List Apart focused on web education for universities and I'd like to share a story about one way ...

Review of Pro Django by Marty Alchin (1/2)

2009 January 21

5 second review: Reading this book will make you a much better Django Programmer.

In full disclosure, I was sent a review copy of this book by the publisher, but I had already pre-ordered it on Amazon, and the copy I am reviewing is that copy. The review copy is ...

Django now has fast tests

2009 January 15

As of Changeset 9756, Django's test suite is A HELL OF A LOT FASTER. This was one of the 1.1 Features and probably the one I was looking forward to the most. Django Unit Tests ...

Year in Review

2008 December 31

Well it's been a crazy roller coaster year for me. So this post is going to be the typical recap of what's gone on with my life and my blog over the past year. I'm really happy with where I'm at both professionally and personally, and ...

Starting a Django Conventions Project and Reference

2008 December 03

During the last month I have proposed some conventions for Django, mostly in the realm of templates. In doing so I have looked around for other documented places where conventions are mentioned. I haven't found a really good reference for Django conventions. [Brian's post](http://oebfare.com/blog ...