Just having a play around with a Python script that will login to a standard Django login form. I thought I’d share it as it’s quite interesting and I’m sure someone might find a use for it.
It uses the standard Python modules urllib2, urllib and cookielib. It also requires BeautifulSoup for getting the generated…

Django’s database querying is there to make life easier but it’s also easy to forget about the SQL that is still generated under the hood. When using Django’s query objects it’s extremely difficult to know how often the database is being hit and with what SQL queries. We often write queries in our views,…

I’ve created a short video to help explain what the issues are when writing JavaScript functions inside loops and how to use function scope to solve those issues. Enjoy.
Full screen it in order to read the code.

I’ve blogged before about giving users of a web application feedback on the page whilst they wait for something to load and also about slowing down the responses from AJAX requests in order to give those users time to fully read and understand that feedback. I’ve recently built some more code to help achieve…

Yesterday I happily got an invite to Google+ from @quagliero. Not sure if it’s still invite only but I’ve been having a go with it yesterday and today. Also installed the Android app which brings everything together really nicely. So far I can safely say I really like the service.
However, I have a bit…

I have just updated my SimpleModal JavaScript component and released it as version 2. You can read about the script and download it from it’s page here.
I’ve just improved it a little to better support newer browsers and tested in the latest jQuery version.
I’d like to mention that I’ve been using this script in…

It has been a pretty rainy weekend so I’ve decided to do some Python programming and have come up with a set of tools to help build API’s in django.
I know there are a few libraries already available for building API’s in django (I’ve used and contributed to some of them) but since…

I built this whilst watching Britain’s Got Talent yesterday. I wasn’t enjoying the show to much. It’s a simple jQuery plugin that you can attach to textarea or input elements which will limit the amount of characters that are allowed for the input and also show a counter in the top right corner to…

Recently I installed PostgreSQL on a Windows 2003 server. I also wanted to back up one of the PostgreSQL databases to a folder on the server on a daily basis as an extra precautionary measure. PostgreSQL comes with a program called pg_dump which can be used to create a back up of a database….

We have recently moved towards the use of HTML 5 at my work. For those who have done the same you will already know of the extra work you need to do before HTML 5 will work in Internet Explorer browsers. The way we did it, which is probably the way most people do…