Here's where we adapt and evolve our ideas

A lot of websites display notifications in one form or another these days. Facebook shows the new message notification, Gmail have the new mail notifications (with the support of browser notifications). I was asked today how hard it would be to implement a real-time notification system. The answer, as it...

Sometimes it's handy to be able to generate an in memory image in your tests. This is faster than using an image from the filesystem, but the biggest benefit for me is not needing to spend ages wondering where exactly in your project you should store your single test image....

Cookiecutter_ is a command line utility which constructs code from a set of Jinja2 templates. It can use these templates directly from a Github repository as well, prompting for configuration values as needed. It's fairly simple, but I can see it becoming one of those indispensable tools. I've been...

Hooking up Johnny Cache and seeing your SQL query count drop down to next to nothing is a really satisfying feeling. Recently we've taken on a client running on Heroku, which enforces certain constraints meaning we had to do a few additional things to get Johnny running. Heroku's memcache add-on...

Django's GIS framework is superb, and really fairly simple to use, but it can be a bit of a pain to get PostGIS and associated bits installed. The instructions here were a great help, but I needed to update a few things to get them working for Postgres9.1. I've put...

Twitter have released an open source HTML and CSS starter kit called Bootstrap. It provides defaults for front endy bits like typography, forms and buttons. Better still, there's a Pinax theme based on it, making bootstrap styling your forms as easy as form|as_bootstrap. I can see this being a really...

It seems that an Ubuntu x64 upgrade to Lucid breaks SQLYog under Wine. Installation seems to complete okay, but when attempting to run seemingly nothing happens, or you'll see an ODBC error if you run from a terminal. This is how to fix it: - Grab a copy of odbc32.dll...

Reprieve found themselves in a situation where they needed to scale up their site in a hurry. Stephen Fry had agreed to tweet a link to an article about one of their client cases to his 1.25 millions followers, and they'd been warned that the resulting traffic spike was likely...