Development

Today is a day for Python and Django development, and I’m enjoying a free and exceptionally well written book on the subject called The Django Book 2.0.  It’s available in HTML on the main website and in epub, mobi, and other formats here.

Short form review: Wow, I’m impressed!

As a developer who focused on PHP / LAMP programming for the past few years (with the occasional Google Apps Engine Python project), I was delighted with Django and how fast I was able to create functional and easily navigable web applications in Python. I credit most of this progress to The Django Book, which as of this post I am about half way through.

The Django Book focuses on getting experienced programmers who are new to Django up to speed with the framework through instruction, examples, and short demos. That’s the first half of the book. The  second half focuses on advanced and highly practical topics like memcached support, middleware (plugins), code clarity, and integration. It also features short relevant side discussions on overall history and why things are the way they are throughout.  The book promises to make the reader an expert in Django and so far it appears to be delivering.

My only dilemma now is project hosting. I was originally planning to launch a new Django site this weekend with Google App Engine’s support, but I’m now torn between using that or my existing budget hosting. I may try both tomorrow and see which solution works better.

For the past few years I’ve been a bit bad about registering domain names for projects and then not using them.  I finally have the time and energy to follow up, so I”m working on two new projects I hope to launch within a couple months.

Making websites has always been easy for me, and it’s become even more simple with the tools available today. One of the sites will be a blogging site in WordPress, and the other will be an experiment with Ruby on Rails, Amazon, and the Twitter API.

I’m really grateful for not just the free hosting plans, API’s, and service offerings that have popped up, but the level of quality and reach that are allowing some of these experiments. I pay for HostGator service for this blog and will use it for the new WordPress site, but for the Ruby project I can use Heroku which has a free tier that lets me play with the latest Ruby tools in a scalable and ideal environment.

After I updated the WordPress on this blog to version 3.5.1 I could not save the order and location of my administration dashboard widgets.  No matter what arrangement I used, after a page refresh they stacked themselves out of order into the first column.

I explored the WordPress database and discovered the dashboard ordering information was correctly saved in the wp_usermeta table with the key meta-box-order_dashboard.  However, WordPress was reading an apparently older version of a similar key: wp_meta-box-order_dashboard.

I solved the problem by deleting the old key wp_meta-box-order_dashboard from table wp_usermeta. This caused WordPress to use the newer key (without the prefix) and now the administration widgets behave.