Also, since I’m using Git on top of SVN, the Apress book’s section on using Git with other repository software is sufficiently technical without, again, overwhelming you with the details.

Kathy Sierra once posted about Just In Time vs Just In Case Learning.  The O’Reilly book quickly becomes a “just in case” book, whereas Apress’ book is much more “just in time.”  The Apress book supports my mantra, courtesy of Bre Pettis: “Pretending you know what you’re doing is almost the same as knowing what you are doing, so just accept that you know what you’re doing even if you don’t and do it.”

There is an inherent conflict between South and Fabric when we do this.  We use Fabric for roll-out from the repository to staging and production, and call migrate in the process.  We came to use South late in the development cycle, and many of our apps were converted to South long after they’d been populated with data.  We know how to do the whole “create, migrate data, drop table” migration process, but the real trick was 0001_initial.py; South “fakes” this for tables with existing data, recording that it was run when, in fact, it was skipped over in favor of the version created ages ago by migrate.py syncdb.

When we roll out to another stage, that database has no knowledge of this fakery.  Neither does South.  Fabric would call ‘migrate’ and the process would crash with warnings about how the table already exists.   So how do we get past that step?

Well, the answer would be to modify 0001_initial.py to test if the table already exists, and to skip if it does.  We need for the engine to fail only when actually accessing the data, and we need it to fail early.  Most models have a core table, the one without which the entire app would be meaningless.  In my example, that table is “stories.story”:

    def forwards(self, orm):

        # Probe for this.  If it works, we don't want to proceed,
        # because this isn't a migration, it's a build-out.

        if not db.dry_run:
            try:
                x = orm['stories.Story'].objects.all()
                return
            except Exception, e:
                pass

Now, if the database table doesn’t exist, the ORM handler will throw an exception and we’ll proceed to build the table. If it does, the table already exists and we shouldn’t proceed.

The truisms of our business are “It’s an attention economy, where revenue is driven by how much attention you can get,” and “In order to succeed, a website must have multiple streams of income.”

Therefore, “In order for your website to succeed, it must have multiple ways of getting attention.”

And that’s the tricky part.  In the real world, that still takes patience, legwork, and dedication.

(defun paren-bounce ()
  (interactive)
  (let ((prev-char (char-to-string (preceding-char)))
	(next-char (char-to-string (following-char))))
    (cond ((string-match "[[{(<]" next-char) (forward-sexp 1))
          ((string-match "[\]})>]" prev-char) (backward-sexp 1))
          (t (error "%s" "Not an expression boundary.")))))

(global-set-key [(control ?%)] 'paren-bounce)

Similar solutions can be found here and here. I suspect the latter is where I got mine from– there are minor differences, but his page hasn’t been updated since 2001, so that’s about right.

The choice of javascript turned out to be simple: I’d use jQuery. Not only is it easy to write with, but there’s already an incredible plug-in for jQuery called Cycle. Having read through the documentation, the only “tricks” would involve automagically generating the thumbnails, placing them in-line within the slide show, and ensuring they had the right z-index so that they’d be visible.

You can read the description or skip right to the demo. The source code is all there.

The basic premise is that cycler automatically fade between the images, using the standard “fade” setting. So the entirety of the javascript, after importing jQuery and Cycler, is this:

$(document).ready(function() {
    $('#slides').cycle({
    fx: 'fade',
    delay: 4000,
    speed: 200,
    pager: '#slide-thumbnails',
    pagerAnchorBuilder: function(idx, slide) {
        var s = $('img', slide).attr('src');
        return ('<a href="#"><img src="' + s + '" /></a>');
    }})
});

Basically, we’re looking for the DOM element ’slides’, and all of its immediately children will be treated like slides. We also have a second DOM element ’slide-thumbnails’, which I’m filling with a simple anchor containing a copy of the image.

The DOM element ’slides’ has individual slides, which look like this:

<div>
  <img src="./95.jpg">
  <div>
    <h2>Omaha</h2>
    <p>At the annual Pumpkin patch run.</p>
  </div>
</div>

To be fair, I’m assuming every image is the same size. That’s relatively important.

The only remaining trick is to wrap slides is another div, ’slide-container’, position relative, and both ’slides’ and ’slide-thumbnails’ are positioned absolutely with respect to ’slider-container.’  ‘Slide-thumbnail’ is made the width of a thumbnail, forcing them into a vertical column.  The z-index of both ’slides’ and ’slide-thumbnails’ are both set so that the thumbnails are above the slides.

It’s simple and elegant.  A little positioning allows the title and text to be placed accordingly, and a nice black background, set to 66% opacity (which you can do with PNG) allows you to place the title and text on the page with a nice delimeter.

Metacritic has in-house artists who make sure the left thumbnail bar doesn’t stomp all over the image. You’ll have to master some fine Gimp or Photoshop to achieve the same effect.

Check out the demo.  Source code is all there.

http://cdn.mycompany.com/images/someimage.jpg

Which is all fine and good. Django’s MEDIA_URL is usually suffixed with a closing slash, meaning that if you’re in the habit of typing something like %(foo)s/images/someimage in a standard python template, you’re going to end up with:

http://cdn.mycompany.com//images/someimage.jpg

And the CDN throws a wobbly. Most djangoites know to write the template as {{ MEDIA_URL }}images/someimage.jpg apparently. I need to build that habit. Apache is forgiving. Amazon is not.

#header { ... }
#header img { ... }

You write:

#header {
    ...
    img { ... }
}

Which, believe me, makes a whole lot more sense. Even better, if you’re fond of the clearfix technique, then you’ll see why I fell in love with LessCSS. I had a long sidebar object, and I realized that I needed to make it clearfix to deal with some float issues. I had .clearfix { ... } defined already in my CSS, and I had my “.social-networks” class that I wanted clearfixed. LessCSS let me write:

.social-networks {
    .clearfix;
    ...
}

And it all worked the way I expected it to, without my having to clutter up the HTML with layout hacks.

Yes, this means that there are duplicates in the CSS LessCSS actually spits out, but that shouldn’t matter, any more than you care about bitsequence duplication in a large C++ program’s object code. I tend to look down on metaframeworks; my experience with using Ruby to write Scriptaculous code, or GWT, is that unless I want to jump through strange hoops I’m limited to expressing in Javascript only what can be expressed by the writers of the Ruby or Java-based framework.  This problem is made worse by the promise of not having to learn Javascript to be expressive in it.  I call shenanigans.   The win for using any framework has to seriously overwhelm the loss of expressiveness. I don’t bemoan losing the expressiveness of assembly language when I write in Python (although if I did have a problem that needed assembly language, I’d write in ASM, build a C wrapper, and compile the thing into a Python module… because I know all three of those languages^*), and the only thing I lose using LessCSS is browser hackery, which I shouldn’t be doing anyway.

The containerization of cascades is such a clear win for me that I can’t imagine going back to doing CSS by hand. Well, I can, I just wouldn’t want to.

LessCSS does not carry your CSS comments from its source file to the CSS output, so it’s inappropriate if you need browser hacks that rely on poor comment parsers (I’m looking at you, Opera) or have alternative uses for comments in CSS (such as Wordpress’s style.css file does).

They do nothing but churches. Black churches, too. Sharper FX is an 11 on the scale of Manliness. Watch some of the Flash splash pages. They’re amazing. I love this site.

Their hiring website is a horror. No, really, go look, unless you’re an epileptic. (Sadly, the effect only seems to be present for Firefox users. Opera, Chrome, and IE6 didn’t show the evil.) Then go read The Federal Electronic and Information Technology Accessibility Standards, better known as “Section 508″, and document how they’re out of compliance. (Hint: Section 1194.21k).

I fully believe it’s possible to design very attractive websites that don’t violate Sec508. CBRE has failed on a galactic scale with this abomination.

If you’re not a Firefox user, here’s the horror: Every input button has this added to its CSS: text-decoration:blink;.

Yes, that’s right. Every input button is set to “blink.” I don’t know what’s worse: that the people who wrote their site thought that was cute, or that Firefox honors it.

It turns out that it wasn’t working because I hadn’t stopped and restarted X. So, when I did that after installing some new fonts, everything went kablooey. The most tragic was Emacs, which grabbed the mouse and keyboard and never let go. Very annoying. I had to kill X remotely, logging in through my Palm pilot (which isn’t much fun, believe me.)

The problem with very stable OS’s is that when they go unstable, the events that caused the instability may be separated from the experience of instability by days, even weeks. In this case, four weeks. It wasn’t until X had died for the third time– this time is a screen session I had accidentally started it in, but which luckily preserved the output of X’s error log– that I finally saw Emacs spitting out all these “at-lock-FAIL” warnings and wondered what the heck those might be. A quick un-install of the accessibility components and I’m back up and running, but man, that was annoying.