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Content in the Development Category

Doing More with HTML5

If you haven't noticed, I haven't been do much blogging lately. Nor have I been tweeting, facebooking or any other social experiment. I've been hard at work, finishing up projects, starting new ones and opening a whole new line of business.

Posted: Wednesday, September 01, 2010

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Super Simple Posting

By now we've all probably seen, read, or use Tumblr. The people that designed that app put a lot of great thought into the usability of their site and bringing design and functionality together. I like the quickness and ease of use, which is why I wanted my "Super Simple CMS" to model those same attributes.

Basically I wanted to start with the simple stuff. That's right I would like my own CMS to be as simple at Tumblr and Twitter. Actually what I want to do is make it easy enough where I could tell someone to post an entry in less than five steps. But in order to do that I need to start slow, and add features as they come along.

Posted: Tuesday, March 30, 2010

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qTip Framework and styling

Often times I set out to build a certain piece of functionality only to find out that it's been created by someone much smarter than I. So like any good developer I use what's there and tweak it to fit my customer needs. This time I needed a nice way of displaying YouTube videos, and instead of embedding them I wanted a sexy popup on the site. It just added a bit of flair that you don't get with an embed and it also save some real estate.

Posted: Thursday, March 25, 2010

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Generate Archive List in Django

I wrote a tutorial a while ago in pdf form that walked you through creating a blog with Django. One of the pieces that I left out, was how to use the information in your blog to create a list of available months for an archive. To do this, we are going to use Djangos templatetags. Here is how we do it.

Posted: Saturday, January 02, 2010

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Moving on with TeeShirt Nut

You can see by the picture below, that the content has come along nicely, but there are still some formatting issues that need to take place. What you are seeing below is the before picture. As you'll notice the formatting is way off when it comes to comments.

 

Posted: Monday, December 14, 2009

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Making Things Fresh

The last few weeks have been extremely busy. I appears as though everyone needs something as the end of the year draws near. Luckly for me, I love what I do and hearing from less active customers about new work is a lot of fun.

One of my very first customers was a private label company that is now looking to redo the whole customer interface to their website. Meaning, they don't like the way the website looks and they want to revamp the whole deal. This is one of those projects that I like but it stings a little bit at the same time. You see, I was the original designer on this project, and now they are telling me that my design has outlived it's usefulness and that I need to come up with something different.

Posted: Friday, October 23, 2009

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Lets Debate This

Finally it's time for something fun. From time to time I get in those friendly arguments with my friends about which of two things are better. You know, Bud Lights better than Coors Light, or Superman could kick the crap out of Spider-man. Whether or not any of this is true, really isn't the point, it's the debate that ensues that generally makes for a good laugh and a heck of an interesting night.

So I thought to myself, why not create a site for me and my friends to post the pieces we feel are debatable. That's right, put our little friendly debates online and see if others agree with us or not. With the power of Django behind us, it really shouldn't be that hard at all. In fact we should have a working example up fairly soon.

Posted: Tuesday, October 06, 2009

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Pick A Database Wisely

This week I took on a new client that had begun development of their own Django website, but ran out of internal resources and needed to offload some of the development. Their current site is very static, and has little to no content management behind it, so developing something with Django is a big step up.

One of the first things I noticed was that their current achitecture had SQLite running the backend instead of a more stable database, such as MySQL. It wasn't a production server but it was a live webserver that they intended to make live once the creation of the website was complete.

Posted: Saturday, September 05, 2009

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