Surfing in Kansas

Correct way to handle mobile browsers

2009 November 09

At work, a lot of our sites have sweet mobile versions. The problem is how to educate people of their existence. Currently we just have little ads that show up on the site that promote the ...

Large Problems in Django, Mostly Solved: Database Migrations

2009 November 06

Continuing in the series of big problems that are mostly solved, we have database migrations. A couple days ago I talked about Search.

Database Migrations

Database Migrations are an interesting piece of the Django community. Rails has the functionality built in, but ...

Adding testing to pip

2009 November 05

Python packaging has been in a bit of a state of disarray for as long as I've been using it. Pip has come along to make installing python packages easier. It has a lot of features that are useful, but they have been talked about in many other blog ...

Making Template Tag Parsing Easier

2009 November 03

In my previous post about template tags, I discussed the two steps required for template tags. Today I will be focusing on Parsing of template tags, and how they may be improved in the framework of Class Based Template Tags from yesterday ...

Class Based Template Tags

2009 November 03

The problem

In Django, template tags currently are separated between a Node class and a "parsing function". The parsing function takes the tag, represented as a string, parses the input, and passes the correct arguments to a Node class. The Node class then does whatever rendering it does, or updating ...

Large Problems in Django, Mostly Solved: Search

2009 November 02

It's been a little over a year since I started doing Django development full-time, for one of them real jobs. Around that time, there were a few large problems in the community that hadn't been solved yet. They were kind of blemishes when you would talk to people ...

Easily Running the Django Test Suite

2009 October 16

Update As of Django 1.2, Django ships with default test settings for sqlite. They require two databases to be defined, because of Multidb. More information at Django advent and in the docs

Alex Gaynor ...

Hacker Book Club

2009 September 26

At LPDN, our weekly programmer drinkup, we have been talking for a while about watching the SICP lectures from MIT as a fun thing to do. I then got to thinking about how it would be neat ...

Pretty Django Error Pages

2009 September 23

Continuing on with the simple tricks that make everyone's life a little bit better, I know a lot of people hate that Django's 500 pages don't get rendered as a RequestContext ...

Token Testing Talk Slides: Djangocon 2009

2009 September 08

There are the slides to my Token Testing Talk from Djangocon. I'm hoping the videos will be posted soon, but I think that it went well. There were a lot of good questions, and I need to put some recap posts up, but for now here is a copy ...

Debugging Django in Production Revisited

2009 September 05

In a previous post I talked about a neat middleware to debug production environments in Django. It basically checked to see if you were a superuser, or if you were in settings.INTERNAL_IPS, and if so, then it displayed a technical 500 ...

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 ...