tech.agilitynerd webdev

Shrink The Web has announced a new API for free users using their new preview verification feature. This change required changes to my django-stw package.

The changes (lifted from the CHANGELOG.txt):

Changes to the shrinkthewebimage template tag:

• The shrinkthewebimage template tag is NOT backward compatible with version 0.0 …

I've been using Blosxom to power my dog agility blog for over 6 years. In the past year or so I've enabled Facebook comments in addition to my site's own comment plugin. I ran into a problem using Facebook's comments: if the user enters a comment on a page and …

Lately I've been interested in improving the interaction of my agilitycourses website for mobile users. One such improvement is to add QR Codes (aka 2D barcodes) representing the page URLs to the printed representations of pages served as PDFs.

I found that developers have reverse engineered the "api" of the …

I'm adding an "m" subdomain to agilitycourses.com to provide a better mobile browsing experience. I'm using the referrer string in Django middleware (currently using minidetector) to detect whether the client is mobile and redirect them to the mobile site. Since it is likely that some folks will/won't get …

Googility.com is my first Django website and under the covers the oldest code looked like it. I had originally written it with the sole intent of allowing people to enter dog agility businesses and websites into a database that I could use to create a Dog Agility Google Custom …

I use Haystack and the Python Whoosh project to provide search over ~3400 articles in my Googility.com database. I had originally implemented the search in the "simplest way that works". I was making some other enhancement to Googility and noticed the search result page had two undesirable  behaviors:

1. The …

I was looking at the google search results for my Googility web site and noticed that the descriptions shown underneath the title often contained text from my navigation links instead of content from the body of the page:

I did some searching and found the Google Webmaster blog post about …

When I'm making fiddly changes to a web page I like to tweak the CSS using the Firefox Firebug plugin. It has the advantage of letting you try changes quickly and see the effect. The downside has always been that you had to then change the source CSS file to …

Ran into an interesting problem at work this past week that had a simple and pleasing resolution. We have an in house developed JavaScript grid on some of our pages and when users entered some text strings we'd generate invalid JSON payloads that would give the user an error page …

I recently updated my Django template tag for simplifying the use of Shrink The Web images. They recently announced a CDN based distribution of images and they took the opportunity to modify their API.

The updated template tag is on django snippets.

The STW folks have asked be to extend …