A few weeks ago I tweeted about holding some kind of code-oriented meetup here in Edmonton. This was prompted by a conversation Paul, Adam, Jordan and myself had at Railsconf. We were talking about how DemoCamp, while loads of fun, doesn’t fully satisfy us. The demos are usually interesting …

I decided to strip the style from my site for a day, and post pictures of it naked.

It’s quite obvious from the frequency of my posts that I’m not what you’d call an “avid blogger.” There is a reason for this, and it’s not that I don’t have anything to say. In fact, my problem is quite the opposite — often, I feel …

jQuery 1.3 introduced a new feature called live event binding which simplifies attaching event handlers to existing elements as well as future elements. This is very useful because using the older bind() function attaches event-handlers only to those elements that are present in the DOM at the time the …

Installing the Python Imaging Library on OS X is a snap. Installing it with libjpeg support is a bit trickier. Since you will probably want to work with JPEG images, here’s how I got PIL and libjpeg working nicely on OS X 10.5.

I just came across a pretty annoying issue with using custom authentication backends in Django. Here’s a quick little note about the authentication system that could save you some time, if you ever come across the same issue.

Because of it’s origins in a busy newsroom, Django makes optimizing web application performance a breeze. Some high-level examples of this are the awesome “cache framework”:http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/topics/cache/ and the “shared nothing”:http://djangobook.com/en/1.0/chapter20/#s-shared-nothing approach. But even …

Subversion is an incredibly powerful tool for any team that does web development. It makes things like reverting files and merging multiple team members’ edits a trivial task — concepts that are valuable even for simple files like HTML and CSS.

It has, however, largely remained a geeky tool for developers …

The web applications I produce often involve uploading many large-sized files at once. Due to browser limitations (which currently limit file selection to one at a time) I use a Flash component to allow users to batch upload files. This is a huge improvement for both usability and performance. However …

I’ve been working full-time with Django for two years now. In that time there have been huge changes to Django; new features, performance tweaks, stability improvements and better documentation, to name a few. But the question on everyone’s mind was When will Django 1.0 be released?

It …

When it comes to typography, I’m a sucker for big, bold and punchy titles. One common way to achieve magnetic, attention-grabbing headlines is to use a slab serif typeface. As usual when choosing a typeface, it is easy to become overwhelmed by the sheer number of high-quality options, so …

Django’s comments app finally got a much needed refactor recently. The old version was quite frankly a mess and felt clunky to use, which is why I started developing django-simple-comments But that work might have been in vain; a -new & improved- completely re-written version of the contrib comments app …