Ah, the bleeding edge.  It’s a war out there!

This morning, Facebook released fbwatir. I’ve just spent the past few hours knocking it around, and have come to the conclusion that it’s pretty mega-borked but it can be saved.

In fact, I now have it working with Cucumber and Firewatir. There are several major flaws in FBWatir, the biggest of which ( Read more... )

Sigh.

I’ve just spent the last few hours wandering around the various “open source” analytics programs trying to find the exact right fit for what I want.  I’m not finding it, which means that (headache ahead) I may have to write something myself.  There’s a django-analytics placeholder in GoogleCode, but it’s empty.  I at least have a model!

( Read more... )

We frequently write little functions that populate the Django context, and sometimes we want that context to be site-wide, and we want every page and every Ajax handler, basically everything that takes a request and spews a response, in our application to have access to that information.  It might the user’s authentication, or his authorization, or ( Read more... )

Today’s little snippet: Filtering a loosely coupled many-to-many relationship.  As revealed earlier,  I don’t really “get” the difficulty with many-to-many relationships.  I don’t even get the difficulty with signals; if you define the many-to-many manually, handling signals on it is trivial compared to trying to do it manually in one of the ( Read more... )

Repeat after me:

• Registration is not Authentication is not Authorization is not Utilization.
• Registration is not Authentication is not Authorization is not Utilization.
• Registration is not Authentication is not Authorization is not Utilization.

I’ll keep reminding myself of that until I figure out how to disentangle the four from this damned Facebook ( Read more... )

If you’ve created Django Application A, and then Django Application B, it is acceptable (and even sometimes necessary) for Application B to reference Application A.  The canonical example is Django contrib.auth; everyone references that beast.  It is not acceptable for you to go and edit Application A to reference Application B.  That is officially ( Read more... )

The correct call for posting to a user’s facebook wall with Python and pyfacebook, after you’ve established both user authentication via FacebookConnect and gotten stream_publish permission, is:

request.facebook.stream.publish ( Read more... )

One of the nifty things that Django provides is the
{% url backreference %} syntax, which allows
you to name the targets in your list of URL objects and then refer to
them by an explicit name. You can sometimes use the function name
instead, and Django has a way of turning the function name back into
the URL. It works fine as long as the signature ( Read more... )

One thing I see a lot of in professional Django is the importation of ugettext, Django’s internationalization library that leverages the GNU gettext project’s toolkit for generating translation catalogs. Laying the groundwork for translation is important to larger projects intended for universal appeal. Because the underscore is a valid leading ( Read more... )

So, I've put up my latest geek piece: Fixing an omission from Django's simplejson: iterators, generators, functors and closures, which is exactly what it says it is. Django's "simplejson", which bundles up server-side structures and exports them to the browser for interpretation and display in fat client applications, is okay, but it fails in some ( Read more... )