Less is more

2009 December 01

Hopefully you read my previous post about Sass and CSS preprocessors and felt my angst toward learning a new syntax. I've been using LessCSS for about a week and I'm really impressed. For starters, no new syntax to learn. This is simply an augmentation of existing CSS syntax. You get mixins, nested rules, and most importantly, variables. You also get operations but I've yet to find them that useful. Here's my critique

Sass isn't for me

2009 November 30

I've been window shopping the CSS preprocessor world the last week or so. Sass seems to be everyone's new bicycle. It hasn't won me over and here's why...

Working with Python and RabbitMQ

2009 May 20

I recently installed RabbitMQ to handle some message queuing needs at Readernaut and thought I'd share how everything came together. If you'd like to learn more about RabbitMQ please read the excellent Rabbits and Warrens.

Capturing content in Django templates

2009 February 28

As a template designer there are times when you have structural code surrounding a block which is waiting on content from a child template.

Save RAM with mobile middleware

2008 October 07

A while back I wrote an article on how to set up a mobile site with Django. Currently I have a Slicehost account which includes 256MB of RAM. My resources are tight and I really dislike having another set of unnecessary Apache processes for a mobile site that, aside from different templates, is using the same code base. The solution is quite simple, write a middleware.

Creating a basic API with Django

2008 August 11

Creating a simple public API for you site is a lot easier than you may think with Django. You're basically just creating another view and serving it as XML or JSON instead of HTML.

Capistrano rules

2008 March 17

I've grown tired of committing changes to my subversion repository, logging into my server, updating my live checkout, and restarting python processes. I finally decided to implement Capistrano and eliminate this repetition.

Ah-ha Event Delegation

2008 March 05

Wrapping my head around things like OOP took months. It's not because I'm an idiot (I don't think) - it's just because I needed all the explanations to marinate before having an ah-ha! moment.

Switching from Rails to Django

2006 September 11

So back in the Fall of 2005 I launched my foray into the world of Rails like every other designer wannabe programmer. I'll be honest, I did it because everyone else was. Looking back I don't really know why, I just followed the "if it feels good, do it" principle.