Blog Archive

There was a time when just the mention of "jQuery" was enough to cause my face to wrinkle up. This was largely due to having been weened onto the Mootools javascript framework before all else. I also can't deny the fact that I have a natural tendency to avoid the "flyboy answer" to anything. Is jQuery a great tool? Without a doubt. Its also the only framework that seems to actively promote itself, often times through misleading and inaccurate statistics, which attracts masses of flyboys, making it--you guessed it--the "flyboy answer."

However, there are many instances where we won't always be able to use our preferred tools of the trade. This fact means its especially important for any javascript developer to invest time in learning several tools and adapt solutions that make the alternatives more familiar to work with. In this post we'll compare the normative jQuery plugin pattern (as presented by jQuery) to one loosely modeled after the Mootools Class constructor to find a simple and comfortable median between the two in the context of jQuery. The result will be an object oriented plugin that is reusable and allows you to maintain state without having to do elaborate element storage.

The last thing any web developer wants is a dead website. In order to minimize on downtime and keep your viewers and clients happy, your django website deserves a little insurance. In this quick tip we're going to create a simple bash script and cron job that will ensure apache and memcached (or whatever your caching solution may be) get back on their feet quickly in the event of any unforeseen speed bumps.

Doing a quick google for "django twitter" will reveal the numerous twitter apps that are available - however most are best suited for large user driven projects. If you're wanting to pull down a single user's twitter timeline - on a personal blog or portfolio for example - then these other apps might appear a bit over the top.

In this post I'll look at registering your own twitter app, creating some simple template tags for grabbing your tweets that work with the new (and now required) twitter oauth, and lastly setting up a cron job for keeping your tweets cached so as to avoid exceeding your maximum hourly request limit as well as avoiding any blocking functionality on your website.