Category Archives: Web Design & Development

Advice from my Experience with OAuth

I recently finished coding the OAuth authentication method for accessing Picasa photos from within Darkroom. Since it was written client side using JavaScript I was trying to be as minimalist as possible, so I wrote my own minimal implementation rather … Continue reading

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Setting up SSL on Apache

While locally testing Darkroom over HTTPS, Firefox gave me the following error: “Error code: ssl_error_rx_record_too_long”. Turns out I’d never configured the Apache instance on my laptop to use SSL. Once you’ve got the right information it’s really quick to fix. … Continue reading

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MugTug Darkroom, Online/Offline Photo Editing

For those of you who don’t know, a few weeks ago I joined a project called Darkroom from MugTug.com. It’s an image processing application using cutting edge HTML 5 features such as the <canvas> element, localStorage, and application cache, and … Continue reading

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Using a Test Database in Django

As I mentioned in my previous post, we’re using MySQL on our development machines. It has several advantages, but one of the drawbacks is unittests run slower when not using Sqlite (big ups to MockSoul for posting his benchmarks). The … Continue reading

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Cross Database Incompatibility Using Django South

When our team (at Govnex) started using South Migrations we encountered a cross-database compatibility issue. I was using MySQL on my local machine for its performance and so I could browse the database using phpMyAdmin, while our other members were … Continue reading

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Does the Brain Like E-Books?

“Does the Brain Like E-Books?”, NY Times Due to the distractions and time constraints on the Internet, I wonder if publishing is going to change in a way that it would be just as attention grabbing if it were on … Continue reading

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Whitespace Management: Use Tabs, Spaces Considered Harmful

At one of my previous jobs I worked on dozens of websites that had been created by other people. I prefer to use tabs instead of spaces when indenting code, and I can get a little OCD sometimes, so every … Continue reading

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Survey of Best Programming Practices

I was having a talk today with some colleagues about the scarcity of web developers, and even software engineers, who use best practices such as: using version control using a bug tracker writing unit tests using a programming framework In … Continue reading

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Just Moved to RackSpace Cloud Servers

Sorry for the down time, I just moved to RackSpace and got everything up and running. I had some problems migrating WordPress and getting it working, which stemmed from the fact that it was using too much memory. I ended … Continue reading

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Redirection WordPress Plugin

So when I first set up this blog I opted for the /archives/%post_id% permalink structure, which I liked because it was short, elegant, and used unique identifiers. I didn’t like the idea of date and slug based permalinks since they … Continue reading

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