yashh.com

Links for 2009-11-07 [del.icio.us]

Sun, 08 Nov 2009 00:00:00 PST

Juicer - CSS and JavaScript packager
Juicer a Ruby based CSS/ JS packaging tool. I like the way we call juicer from cli. Definatly going to give this a shot.

Links for 2009-11-06 [del.icio.us]

Sat, 07 Nov 2009 00:00:00 PST

The League of Moveable Type
A collection of open source fonts. Got keep checking it regularly.
Note & Point
A bunch of awesome design presentations. Spellbound!!
Noupe
A great resource for design, photoshop, web development resources.

Links for 2009-11-05 [del.icio.us]

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 00:00:00 PST

IP Failover
A wiki article on how to setup IP failover cloud servers so that when a master server is down a slave server takes over and responds to requests. All you need is heartbeat on both servers, set the authkeys for them to communicate and a little HAProxy magic. (via @jacobian)
clarity
A web interface for tailing and grepping the log files in /var/log, written in Ruby and EventMachine.(via @simonw)
DryIcons
A bunch of useful icons which can be reused during design phase.

Links for 2009-11-04 [del.icio.us]

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 00:00:00 PST

Sammy JS
Sammy is a tiny javascript framework built on top of jQuery. Simulates gmail like urls /#inbox/3234324. Samm y uses sinatra syntax and intercept get & post requests to #/something and perform some cool logic.

Links for 2009-11-03 [del.icio.us]

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 00:00:00 PST

Passenger Nginx SSL
A post describing how to install passenger with nginx support. This process actually does n;t build the SSL stuff. To make it build SSL support we need to pass some extra options while configure. Make sure you download OpenSSL and give it as option to the nginx install as well.

Links for 2009-11-02 [del.icio.us]

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 00:00:00 PST

Running PHP with nginx
A tutorial on running php-cgi as daemon on ubuntu. Nginx proxies requests to php-cgi running php. Pretty good alternative to running apache. Apache just takes up too much memory. But its still the best clean way to run PHP.

Links for 2009-11-01 [del.icio.us]

Sun, 01 Nov 2009 23:00:00 PST

Cartographer.js – thematic mapping
Heat maps, point clustering, etc. Built on top of Raphael. (via @jacobian)
Load-Balancing & Failover with NGINX and keepalived
A great article which shows the details of setting up nginx to perform load balancing and failover. Nginx is rock solid and there is a lot of features in it to be explored.

Django image crop and upload to S3

Thu, 06 Aug 2009 23:27:40 -0800

Update: There are quite some intresting projects to create thumbnails and provide storage access. django-imagekit, django-thumbs, sorl-thumbnail, django-storages etc. Check them out!!

It's been a while since I blogged and just wanted to share a quick snippet I wrote to create avatar/profile image for user's. There are quite some reusable apps like django-avatar which you can hook up in no time.

Recently in one my projects, I had a different situation where profile picture was part of a Model (Role). So I had to develop a ...

Tribute to the King

Thu, 25 Jun 2009 19:18:02 -0800

A man who needs no introduction!!

Has given the world a gift, his talent, and, in return, took crucification.

Redefined the term professional entertainer.

A pop phenomenon who never stopped pushing the envelope of creativity

Has his own touch of technology lean boot

The meaning of life is contained in every single expression of life. It is present in the infinity of forms and phenomena that exist in all of creation.

-- Michael Jackson

Finally, King of Pop!!

Switched to VPS

Sun, 15 Mar 2009 11:42:53 -0800

Well I finally motivated my self to switch the hosting to a VPS.

Well its about over an year since I started this blog. I was hosting it on webfaction shared hosting. I really loved their hosting services which were very promising and reliable. I only remember one incident which took webfaction down (fire accident in datacenter) which was a few days of outage. Other than that they were never down.

Anyway webfaction rocks!!!

After a small chat with Will Larson I decided to switch to VPS hosting. I chose linode over slicehost just ...

Finally my first job

Wed, 04 Mar 2009 20:14:59 -0800

Well my 6 months old job hunt finally ended. There is a lot I learned throughout this journey. Quite a lot of experiences varying from pleasant to frustrating. In the end it's all fair.

A few lessons I learned in this period of time.

Never confine yourself to a technology Yup this is a blunder mistake I did. I was so madly in search of a django gig that I completely lost all my confidence after a while. Never get yourself tied to a piece of technology. You can prefer one but never confine yourself to it.

...

Strange development setup

Fri, 30 Jan 2009 09:18:15 -0800

It's a fact that linux rocks at any kind of development. And I firmly believe it.

Well recently I am getting my feet wet with a bit of PHP. Now I am kind of sick to change my development environment to suit PHP. I simply downloaded the MAMP which gives the environment to run PHP. But deep down somewhere I wanted to configure Apache with php and give it a try. I used to have a slice a while back but I just cancelled by slicehost. Paying 20$ for a sandbox is not worth. So I decided ...

Memories 2008

Thu, 01 Jan 2009 15:11:27 -0800

Well after reading the tweet from Chris Amico I felt that I should write a post on my 2008 memories. Well 2008 is quite a big year to me.

First I found django. Well putting a framework name as first point is kind of funny but its the fact. But it was around Dec 2007 and early 2008 I found django. I was fascinated what this framework was and how better its going to be when compared to rails. Well I was learning rails at that time. And I decided to make a blog. ...

Designing for iphone

Tue, 30 Dec 2008 14:53:39 -0800

Well after choking an iphone interface for my blog last week, I felt that I should share a few points which should be considered while designing for iphone. Most of the points may not be new to you but still I would like to remind you one more time.

iPhone Web Development
Uses Web Standards
HTML 4.01
XHTML 1.0
CSS 2.1 and partial CSS 3.xx
JavaScript 1.4, including DOM support
AJAX technologies, including
XMLHTTPRequest
PDF
Quicktime

Things to Avoid

Creating a Mobile site for django powered

Mon, 22 Dec 2008 16:54:24 -0800

Last week I decided to create a mobile interface for my blog. I just wanted to create one just to prove my self that I can do it. And it was quite an easy task. A site optimized for mobile should be light-weight and fast to load.

Some of the important principles to be remembered are: 1. Avoid images (espcially big pictures) as much as possible. 2. Load css and javascript to the minimum (as necessary). 3. Keep the data in the page to minimum.

To put it in simple put everything to minimum level. Now to create ...

Handling profile for a user (pinax based)

Thu, 11 Dec 2008 22:28:43 -0800

I have been using pinax for a while and I love the way it is being developed. I always wanted to write regarding pinax but nevertheless I did n't really initiate myself to do it. But today I would like to do it.

Pinax being a bunch of reusable applications, makes it easy for a developer to pick and plug the apps into his own project. But on the practical side, I think its not a task which can be done easily. I have observed many dependencies among the apps.

I would like to share ...

Setup a slice with apache+wsgi+nginx

Thu, 04 Dec 2008 12:14:57 -0800

Well there are bunch of posts on setting up a slice with django. I just wanted to write one for myself so that I can setup a slice in future without wasting much time searching. When you get a brand new slice you need to setup SSH access into your slice.

I recommend to go with Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid.

Follow this tutorial to get the SSH up. Dont follow the entire tutorial, just get the SSH up and set up a user account other than root. If possible change the port for SSH ...

Right tools for right tasks

Wed, 03 Dec 2008 20:18:36 -0800

Just felt that I should write something else other than django and refresh myself.

There are always a bunch of tools for every task we do. It is important to choose the right one which suites your workflow. A few days back Eric Florenzano's post on "To IDE or not to IDE?" brought me the inspiration to write this post. I always spend a lot of time on searching for tools of professional grade. But later I realized that you need such tools only after some experience.

I started with python ...

Django-syncr Internals

Sun, 30 Nov 2008 21:55:06 -0800

After being an active member in django-syncr I have gained some experience with API calls and parsing data from XML/JSON. It is a lot of fun working in such a project. Recently I have written Readernaut and Brightkite syncr apps which pulls user's data and writes into a django model.

Setting up a django model depends on the data retrieved from the API call. First read the documentation of the API call and know what data is being returned and what is the name of the tag. You can experiment with a ...

Django templatetags

Wed, 26 Nov 2008 23:31:26 -0800

Django template tags are a great boon to developers to perform last minute processing in templates. We often encounter situations where data returned from a view needs further processing, in such cases we can write a django template tag and bring the power of python processing right into template(HTML) level. I personally think django template tags is the best and most striking feature of django.

Yes, as a developer who spent nearly an year on django I think ability to perform something right at template level is amazing. At first I felt that template tag is something complicated and ...

Django comments for authenticated users

Fri, 21 Nov 2008 15:26:04 -0800

Yesterday I read a blog post by Theju regarding 'Using Django comments for authenticated user's. I recommend reading his post before reading this one as I suggest another approach to it.

Let's put some facts together. Django comment's had been refactored in Django 1.0 and now includes some great features like email, url and honeypot to prevent spam etc. Now using the django comments for authenticated user's is not a straight forward approach. You need to write some amount of code to make this happen.

If ...

Expire cache specific to a django view

Sat, 08 Nov 2008 22:27:14 -0800

It is a well known fact that django has some excellent support for caching. Django's support for caching is amazing.

Per-Site
Per-View
Template Fragment &
Low level API

Blog like this use per-site caching which cache everything. But there are situations like where user's posts comments on posts. It's frustrating experience for a user when the comment doesn't appear immediately.

On my chat with Will Larson he suggested me a method to reverse engineer the django cache and observe how the ...