As an advocate of Jinja2 I figured it was about time I got on board the train. Up until now I had been using Jinja1 at work, and in most projects. The main reasoning behind this was there was no good connector. Now many might say that you don’t need a connector, you can just [...]

Today I’m going to talk a little bit about one of our hurdles, and a quick solution we came up with to get around it at iBegin. We needed the ability to override URLs per-site, which by itself is fairly easy. You simply change the ROOT_URLCONF in your local or per-site settings file. Let’s take [...]

One of the common things we do across projects is paginate querysets and lists. Django happens to provide a base Paginator for us, but it’s usefulness is limited. It requires you to do the same repetitive tasks over and over. We’re one of those groups of people who believe that not every URL need’s to [...]

I haven’t made too many posts lately. Whether it’s been from lack of time, or simply nothing to write about who’s to say. That doesn’t mean I haven’t been keeping busy though. We’ve been hard at work over at iBegin deploying some new architecture. It’s a pretty cool feat, but I can’t say too much [...]

(My apologies this rant is long and should probably be called “The EA Nightmare“) As many of you are aware, yesterday was the launch of one of the more anticipated games this year: The Sims 3. So, being a typical gamer, I had to pick it up (and the fact that my girlfriend is nuts [...]

One issue we had come up over at iBegin lately, is the fact that GZipMiddleware tries to encode ALL responses (with a few minor exceptions). In our cases, we sometimes stream actual binary files over the response. Doing this with the standard middleware causes a unicode error as it’s trying to encode all of the [...]

Most of our projects lately are now using JSON data storage in the database. This makes it very efficient for storing additional data without having to run alters are gigantic data sets. It also allows us to store different data for different kinds of sets within the same table. Doing this in Django we originally [...]

For a while now I’ve been wanting to rewrite Lifestream into a contained OO pattern. It seems to be the “best practice” when it comes to WordPress, but tutorials and what are not spread out so it took a bit of time. During the process, I also took the opportunity to speed up certain areas, [...]

This is mostly a note to myself, but also since my blog is very helpful to fellow Google-users I figured I’d throw it up here publicly. Today I needed to update a package on PyPi using setuptools: python setup.py sdist register upload The problem was, no matter what I did, I always seemed to get [...]

A while back I posted a quick, and very simplistic guide to setting up django-sphinx within your project. Since that time we’ve gained a lot of use of the platform. It came to my attention today that the django-nyc group was going to do a presentation on how to setup sphinx within your Django project. [...]