Monthly Archives: January 2009

Satchmo on Ubuntu

I’ve sadly spent the better part of the day getting Satchmo deployed on my slicehost.  It should’ve been easy, as I’ve already installed it on my mac.  Due to Satchmo backwards incompatibilities and some odd things with slicehost locale’s its now a late night and I have a banged head and more than a few [...]

Installing SVN on Ubuntu

Today, for probably the 4th time I created an svn repository.  I find a different crappy tutorial every time as its the kind of setup its just not worth remembering.  I found this one right away though and it worked great!  Saving it for later and as a recomendation to others.
Install Subversion With Web Access [...]

Javascript Relative and Absolute URLs

I recently discovered a small oddity in javascript link elements.  Simply stated, if you access the ‘href’ attribute using getAttribute(‘href’) the result will be different than accessing it with simply ‘href’.  
The getAttribute will return the relative link, where the direct call will return the absolute. 
Here’s the test:
<html>
<body >
<a [...]

Executed In Sequence of Page Load

I was researching some javascript capabilities earlier and from a wikipedia article on Comet learned this
“browsers render HTML pages incrementally, each script tag is executed as it is received.“
Awesome!  This means not just that you can execute javascript before and as the page is loading, but you choose WHEN/WHERE to run it.  To test it out I [...]

Wildcard Subdomains with WebpageDomainNames.com/Godaddy.com

The domain manager for WebpageDomainNames has a confusing way of doing wildcard subdomains.  Googling for this there seemed to be a lot of confusion and I eventually found the answer.  
Usually you make a CNAME record of * to represent the wildcard subdomain.  Instead, with Godaddy make an A record with the name * and [...]

Django Email Admins Using Different Outgoing Email Address

Socialbrowse is deployed on EC2 using the Django framework.  Unfortunately, as we learned the hard way, EC2 has some serious issues with both reverseDNS and email blocklists and is a horrible place to send emails from.  For this reason we use AuthSMTP, an email application that will has a much larger success rate for outgoing [...]

SSHFS for Developing on a Remote Server

As I mentioned in my previous post there is often a reason, such as subdomains or configuration issues, that you cannot develop on localhost.  In this case you’re going to have to develop on a remote server.  This can be horribly inefficient if you’re constantly ftp’ing new code or committing and updating through some revision control system.  
I’ve found [...]

Using Subdomains in Django

Django’s url dispatcher doesn’t handle subdomains.  If you want/need to use subdomains you’ve got to use session middleware.  If you haven’t written any middleware yet don’t freak out, is easy.
There’s some easy documentation for extra information but for our needs all you need to do is make a Class with a function called process_request.  This [...]

Relative URL Parser Snippet

Python 3.0 seems to come with fancy new features to urllib including urllib.parse which is an excellent utility for parsing the different components of URLs. I however don’t use python 3.0 yet and needed a clean way to make full URLs given a base URL and relative URLs.
This is helpful if you’re scraping a [...]

Installing CSSTidy and Scons on OS X or Linux

I’m setting up django-compress, and incredibly helpful django tool for compressing media files.  By default it requires the installation of CSSTidy which was not as smooth of a task as most.  Here are my notes.
Installing Scons
To install CSSTidy you have to have Scons in order to install it.  Scons is similar to Make but uses [...]