Metacritic is an interesting website with a pretty stylish layout, but one thing that drives me nuts is the use of Flash for a simple slideshow on the home page. I decided, as an experiment, to try and replace that with one driven by Javascript.
The choice of javascript turned out to be simple: I’d [...]

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I had a job interview today, and one of the “challenges” with which I was presented was this: “We own several sites. We would like our user to be able to log into the central site as a subscriber, and then all the other sites will know what permissions that user has.”
The sites are [...]

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Yes, that’s a signal boost.
I’ve only played with Node.js for about 24 hours now, and I’m already deeply impressed with it. Node.js is something of a holy grail: an implementation of server-side (and desktop) Javascript with a modern engine (Google’s V8), in which all I/O is event-handled. You no longer care about multiplexing, [...]

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So, I just kicked out another edition of Red State Poly, and I’m trying to figure out what, if anything, I should do with it. There are a few things I could do: obviously, I could work hella harder to make it absolutely consistent with all browsers, but now it works with IE6, 7, [...]

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It seems like such a stupid thing, but hey, now I know how to use CSS sprites.
Basically, it’s the same idea as a viewport slider: treat your rectangular space as a viewport onto a background image. By using the background-position attribute and the .css() control (in jQuery; there are others in other libraries), you [...]

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I spent a good two hours figuring out how to do this and so I’m gleefully going to share it with you.  Those of you with small monitors (or other strange habits) might have operating system dock (the thing at the bottom or top of the screen that you use to start programs, check the [...]

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The correct call for posting to a user’s facebook wall with Python and pyfacebook, after you’ve established both user authentication via FacebookConnect and gotten stream_publish permission, is:
request.facebook.stream.publish(
message = render_to_string(template_path, fb_context),
action_links = simplejson.dumps(
[{'text': "Check Us Out!", 'href': "http://someurl.com"}]),
[...]

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Introduction
When you roll around the web you see lots of web applications that show off some localized capability to get data from a back-end in a semi-real-time manner. The most famous is the “search suggestion” drop-down that comes off Google or Bing, and those are wonderful, but often the Javascript for the drop down [...]

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Most people encountering the Ajax components of Django for the first time usually encounter this pairing:
from django.utils import simplejson
…
return HttpResponse(simplejson.dumps(some_python_obj))
For most applications, this is enough.  But I’m especially fond of iterators, generators, functors and closures, dense components that express one thought well: the structure of a tree, or the rows of a database, to be [...]

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I have added Restricting a function’s scope to a specific object to the Javascript Framework Phrasebook.

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