tech.agilitynerd

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 …

I have been using the free website thumbnail service from Shrink The Web on my dog agility search website Googility since I launched it. It is quick and easy to use and it adds a lot to the look of the pages.

I had created a simple Django template tag …

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 …

I decided to stop displaying the default YouTube video players within posts on my AgilityNerd blog and I started looking for a light boxed player. Their were two main reasons. The smallest video playback window provided by YouTube for HD videos is too wide for my two column layout and …

When I wrote my plugins for tracking the visits to each page (hitcounter), presenting the counts by popularity (favorites), and displaying the most recently read posts (lastread) I used Perl's Storable module as a simple way to serialize the data structure to and from disk. At the time I wasn't …

I was adding django-sitemap to googility.com yesterday and found that Tags don't implement get_absolute_url(). Which makes sense since the site developer would want to decide how to expose them in the URL space.

It is also arguable that links to pages displaying the tag view already exist in the …

I ran across some "interesting" behavior of the Firefox Web Developer Add-on today. When editing JavaScript code I normally leave Web Developer set to "disable cache". This causes all images and, significantly for my purposes, the JavaScript files to be downloaded from the server on every page request. But I …

I first read about ReCAPTCHA in this article in Wired magazine last year.

reCAPTCHA provides a free CAPTCHA web service that pairs together two words from OCR scanned books. One of the words is known and the other couldn't be recognized. The user types in both words not knowing which …