Just as Firebug is an extension to Firefox, extensions exist for Firebug. Webmonkey recently listed their favorite Firebug extensions and some seem interesting. YSlow sounds slick and the optimization suggestions it is based on are well worth reading. PixelPerfect might also be handy for the Interactive Designer types.

- Create a .htaccess page with entry AddType application/x-httpd-php .html .htm

- Save it in htdocs directory

- Open hidden file /etc/apache2/httpd.conf

- Comment out AllowOverride None. Save it.

- Open terminal. Restart Apache. Sudo apachectl restart.

Being a long time Django developer (one year), I was really excited about it because it "runs django". Now this isn't really the case because of BigTable, which isn't a real relational database. However, if you forgo the Django ORM and use GAE models, you can still work with the other things that make Django so awesome: templates and forms. AND, the google models are so similar to Django that you'll barely even notice the difference.

Ok, this isn't a full on review GAE with Django, so I'll cut right to the chase. I'm sure you found this page when you were trying to use django forms to handle the ListProperty model field in your HTML forms. The problem is that things like ModelChoiceField and ModelMultipleChoiceField won't work because they rely on the Django ORM. For that matter, ChoiceField and MultipleChoiceField won't work because they return a list of strings, that although they can be the string for a db.key(), they won't be the Key objects that your new models expect for ListProperty.

So, to get around this I just adjusted the MultipleChoiceField a bit so that it returns the list chosen fields as Key objects:

#MODELS
class Toping(BaseModel):
    name = db.StringProperty(required=True)

class Pizza(BaseModel):
    name = db.StringProperty(required=True)
    toppings = db.ListProperty(db.Key)

    def get_topings(self):
        # This returns the models themselves, not just the keys that are stored in toppings
        return Topping.get(self.toppings)

#FORMS
class PizzaForm(djangoforms.ModelForm):
    toppings = ListPropertyChoice(
                        widget=forms.CheckboxSelectMultiple(),
                        choices=[(rt.key(), rt.name) for rt in db.Query(Topping)]
                    )
    class Meta:
        model = Pizza

#CUSTOM FIELD
from django.newforms.util import ErrorList, ValidationError
from django.newforms.fields import ChoiceField
from django.newforms.widgets import MultipleHiddenInput, SelectMultiple
from appengine_django.models import BaseModel

from appengine_django.serializer.python import smart_unicode
from django.utils.translation import gettext

class ListPropertyChoice(ChoiceField):
    hidden_widget = MultipleHiddenInput

    def __init__(self, choices=(), required=True, widget=SelectMultiple, label=None, initial=None, help_text=None):
        super(ListPropertyChoice, self).__init__(choices, required, widget, label, initial, help_text)

    def clean(self, value):
        """
        Validates that the input is a list or tuple.
        """
        if self.required and not value:
            raise ValidationError(gettext(u'This field is required.'))
        elif not self.required and not value:
            return []
        if not isinstance(value, (list, tuple)):
            raise ValidationError(gettext(u'Enter a list of values.'))
        new_value = []
        for val in value:
            val = smart_unicode(val)
            new_value.append(val)
        # Validate that each value in the value list is in self.choices.
        valid_values = set([smart_unicode(k) for k, v in self.choices])
        for val in new_value:
            if val not in valid_values:
                raise ValidationError(gettext(u'Select a valid choice. %s is not one of the available choices.') % val)
        # These are the only changes to the django MultipleChoice Field
        # we just convert the list of strings to a list of keys
        key_list = []
        for k in new_value:
            key_list.append(BaseModel.get(k).key())
        return key_list

Now for a quick expaination... The ListPropertyChoice class itself is really just the MultipleChoiceField from Django V0.96. I had to use this because I couldn't get the latest svn version to work w/ App Engine due to some SafeUnicode issues I haven't looked into yet. The only real changes to that class are the last four lines which return the list of keys instead of key-strings from the form.

The only other thing that might need explanation is the get_toppings() method that I added to the Pizza model. This is just a shortcut to access the models instead of the keys, as they're stored in the ListProperty.

What I have done.

• cp /path/to/symfony/lib/task/generator/skeleton/project/symfony symfony

• cp
  /path/to/symfony/lib/task/generator/skeleton/project/config/ProjectConfiguration.class.php
  config/ProjectConfiguration.class.php

• Then, replace `##SYMFONY_LIB_DIR##` with the path to the symfony 1.1 `lib/` directory.
• Launch the `project:upgrade1.1` task from your project directory to perform an automatic upgrade:

  ./symfony project:upgrade1.1

• Some issue with "sfAdminGenerator wants a <classname>Form-class when generating crud module" and http://trac.symfony-project.org/ticket/3125 was my saviour.

  ./symfony propel-build-all

• Done! Smoking time.

Reference/s:

• http://trac.symfony-project.org/browser/branches/1.1/UPGRADE

The author provides examples of these web site performance techniques on the companion book site.

I divided the list into two groups, one for front-end developers and one for sysadmins since on most of my projects these are separate roles/people.

For the front-end developer

• Learn/use telnet port 80, netcat, dig, IBM Page Detailer, Firebug, YSlow, JSLint.
• CSS sprites for all (or strategically sliced subsets) nav icons and dingbats in optimized png format (ch. 1)
• No meta cache-control or expires in html, we'll use Apache conf for this (ch. 3)
• If possible use PHP vars when constructing internal links to images, CSS, scripts etc. (So we can later rev the file names, split HTTP requests to pairs or CNAMES or use a CDN), (chs. 11, 9, 3, 2)
• CSS always in one reduced, minifyied, obfuscated, externally linked file. [YUI Compressor] (chs. 5, 8, 10)
• Scripts go at the bottom of the page in external linked filed, reduce to fewest number of eternal script file possible, minify and obfuscate (chs. 6, 8, 10, 12)
• No CSS expressions (ch. 7)
• Use image beacons and onload handler to track outbound traffic (ch. 11)
• Track internal traffic using redirects with mod_rewrite (compromise, test to make sure it is worth the delay in you environment vs referrer log analysis)

Inferred from the book and past experience

• Use symlinks or very short directory names and filenames (where revving isn't likely) on common external resource (images, scripts, etc) to reduce the occurrence of stuff like http://i.cdn.turner.com/cnn/.element/img/2.0/Weather/go_btn.gif to http://i.cdn.turner.com/cnn/i/go.gif, or if your not using a CDN or image servers, why not use relative references like /i/go.gif. In this example you save 27 characters and 54 characters respectively—for each occurrence.
• Use a favicon.ico, the browser is going to request it anyway and if its not there its just going to fill up your error log

For the sysadmin

• Learn/use telnet port 80, netcat, dig, IBM Page Detailer, Firebug, YSlow, JSLint.
• Implement gzip and mod_gzip_item_include. Consider mod_gzip_can_negotiate and mod_gzip_update_static for items that don't change very much and can be cached in their compressed form on the server—saves CPU cycles. (Ch. 4)
• Use vary: accept-encoding, user-agent (ch. 4)
• Reduce the number of hostnames/DNS lookups required to compose your web pages. Use 2-4 hostnames per page at most. Maximize parallel downloads. Use keep-alive
• Use DirectorySlash off or turn off AutoIndex to solve the missing trailing slash problem (ch. 11)
• Know the trade-offs for using redirection for tracking internal and external links, memorize the HTTP response codes and know how they impact search ranking, fall in love with mod_rewrite if you must. (Ch. 11)
• Configure ETags correctly (ch. 13), Don't use the default settings (ch. 13)
• Use a robots.txt even if it is just

  user-agent: *
  allow: /

Adrian Holovaty

Jacon Kaplan Moss

Michael Trier

Russel Keith Magee

James Bennett

Malcolm Tredinnick

• Rackspace
• Mosso (a Rackspace Company)
• Engineyard (Ruby on Rails apps)

From: Carlos Lima
Sent: quinta-feira, 26 de junho de 2008 11:05
To: LabOne - Developers

Pessoal,
Teremos um bate-papo com um dos papas do desenvolvimento web ágil, especialista em Ruby On Rails, Fábio Akita.

EVENTO: Café da Manhã com Fábio Akita (www.akitaonrails.com)
DATA: Sexta-feira, 4 de julho de 2008
HORA: 8h
LOCAL: Labone

Precisa dizer que é só para os funcionários?

Here's how it goes: we all agree to completely ignore the existence of Internet Explorer!

That's it!  As simple as that.

It will, of course, lead to conversations like this:

Client: That new site you've just designed, it doesn't work in Internet Explorer

Web designer: Inter.. what?

Client: Internet Explorer.  My web browser.  Internet Explorer 7.  IE7?

Web designer: IE7? Never heard of it.

Client: You must have heard of it.  Internet Explorer!  It comes installed on every Windows PC.

Web designer: It's not on mine.  Seriously? It's called IE7? ... nope! Really doesn't ring a bell, I'm afraid. It must be one of those really tiny, unpopular browsers.  We don't support those, there's no point.

That's my dream anyway, and has absolutely nothing to do with my spending a week debugging some code in IE6 and IE7 ... whatever they are.

The Ruby language was developed in Japan in the 90s and Rails is the framework. If you a nuby like me and interested to learn how simple and beautiful this Ruby is, I came across this webpage, which is actually an web app to introduce you to Ruby in 15 mins or less. Hit the image for the link.

There are only five of us who work on reddit; we couldn't have made this site if it weren't for a great community of developers. In no particular order, here's a quick list of the open source products that reddit is built and runs upon: Debian, lighttpd, HAProxy, PostgreSQL, Slony-I, various python libraries, Psychopg, pylons, Solr, Tomcat, Ganglia, Mercurial, Git, gettext (translation), daemontools, and memcached.

Five people. 1,000,000's of pages every day.

By using the "about" attribute specified in RDFa, you can modify that claim HTML so that it applies to a different URL and not the page in which the HTML is embedded.

Let's say you have a media file "my.mp3" (which may or may not have embedded license info), it is online at http://example.com/my.mp3, and you have a web page at http://example.com. Let's also say you have a chunk of HTML for saying that the current web page is under an Attribution-Sharealike license.

Your web page containing that chunk would normally have HTML along these lines:

      <html><head><title></title></head><body>
      [the HTML for the license claim]
      </body></html>
    

The modified HTML would look like this:

      <html><head><title></title></head><body>
      <div about="http://example.com/my.mp3">
      [the HTML for the license claim]
      </div>
      </body></html>
    

This is a new way to publish a license claim for a media file. The existing way is to embed the claims into the file using a tool like liblicense. The reason you would use the new method is that the benefits and drawbacks are a better match for your needs.

Pros of embedding within media files:

1. A license claim inside a file travels with the file, so that the license claims on the copy are still identifiable. If you use the external HTML method, the only way to tell that a copy at a different URL is under the same license is to do a byte-for-byte comparison of the files.
2. A license claim inside a media file is instantly accessible to any program which is already accessing the file and only slightly less accessible to a program which already has a copy of the file. A license claim in external HTML requires the HTML page to be found, fetched, and parsed.

Pros of using an external HTML file:

1. A license claim embedded in a media file can only be recognized by fetching the file and parsing it. AJAX techniques usually can't be used to parse a binary file. Bandwidth and latency limits may also prevent this. In contrast, an HTML file can be parsed by JavaScript, and is often small enough that bandwidth and latency are not a problem.
2. A license claim inside a media file is hard for web spiders to see, and most search engines won't index it. In contrast, a license claim in HTML is easy for a spider to see and all search engines will index it.
3. A license claim inside a media file requires a dedicated program like liblicense on the client side to edit. A license claim in HTML can be generated using a simple web application like the license chooser at CreativeCommons.org, and any decent content management system (like Drupal or Wordpress) could easily do it.

You don't have to choose between these methods. There is no reason why these two methods can't be used together, which would give you the good parts of both.

As with all implementation proposals, this method may not work. It may be that the RDFa "about" element isn't widely available enough, given that it is specific to XHTML 2 as far as I know. It may be that the rel-license microformat can't be extended like this.

There's one improvement to this method that I don't know how to do -- making it work in existing search engines with no changes on their part. If it's possible to tweak the HTML syntax so that existing search APIs or query arguments could be used to find Creative Commons works, the entire open media ecosystem would benefit.

It's not that they don't solve huge data problems, like searching for reservations amongst thousands of flights. Or that they have flawed styles or HTML, they all look relatively useful and interesting, even if a little anonymous and busy in a corporate way.

But in between the layout designers and database geeks, did anyone at expedia, or last-minute, or practically any of them, actually try using their own websites?

When I click the calendar to set a trip date, I don't understand why when I click on the return calendar, it can't figure out that if I'm travelling in July, I'd be unlikely to want to return in June. And that if I look for one holiday in October, when I look for the next option, I am ... er ... still not looking for a holiday in June. And I'm still looking for a holiday two people, so don't change the sodding option for me.

It would take precisely three hours of my time to sort out some javascript to stop my experience of searching for a holiday reducing me to a jibbering web design nazi. Why can't these guys sort it out?

Memang setelah tau sedikit tentang sistem pembangun sebuah web, aku jadi kecanduan mengutak-atik berbagai macam website mulai dari website komunitas, website pribadi, weblog, dan website pendidikan yang semuanya *kecuali pendidikan* memakai free hosting service dan free domain. Yah, lama kelamaan rajin banget di depan kompie cuman buat edit cpanel lah, edit nama domain lah, edit template lah.. yang akhirnya kegiatan itu terhenti *berkurang maksudnya* karena sebuah proyek pembangunan website sebuah sekolah tinggi di kota tetangga. Proyek yang *denger²* udah lama dikerjain tapi gag selese² gara² sang admin melarikan diri entah kemana akhirnya diserahkan ke kami *me and my boss*.

Pembangunan dimulai dari portal sekolah. Aku memakai joomla sebagai web buildernya. Nggak ada satu minggu aku kerjain, portal selesai, tinggal isi konten aja. Berikutnya membangun e-learning menggunakan moodle yang sudah terbukti dan dipakai di berbagai PT di Indonesia.

Langkah² awal termasuk ringan, tetapi semakin kesini semakin rumit.

Tahap berikutnya, membangun sistem informasi mahasiswa dan kampus (SIAK). Aku nyoba nyari software² pendukung, surfing di internet berjam-jam, sampai aku menemukan sebuah website tentang software web khusus untuk sistem kampus, yaitu Sisfokampus.

Setelah membaca blog² dan tutorial²nya, aku mencoba mendownload tu sistem. Aku coba ekstrak, dan jreeng! masuk halaman index. Aneh. itulah yang kurasain pertama kali liat tu sistem. Kita dihadapkan pada beberapa link login seperti administrator, superuser, dll. Namun dengan panduan singkat yang tedapat di website tu sistem, akhirnya aku bisa masuk login administrator, dan mulai mencoba ini itu semuanya.

Lambat laun jalan terbuka, dan kami *me and my boss* mulai mengerti cara kerja sistem itu, dan memang ternyata cocok/sesuai dengan apa yang diinginkan konsumen. :D

Memang rumit, tapi dari kerumitan itulah ada suatu keasyikan yang membuat kita kecanduan. *opooo kuwi?*

wakwkak.

sukses pokokna buat sisfokampus! :D

I am sure Facebook's dudes need to rethink the whole concept and come up with something more sensible.

  I have also returned from a 4-day stay at my parents place while they are on vacation. I don't know how I ever lived with cats. The newest one is constantly jumping around and eating lizards. She does this thing where she will bring lizards and bugs in from outside, carry them into the bathtub, and fight (play) them until they are dead. Thunderdome bitch!

Jeff - here are the links for you:

Google Contacts API: http://code.google.com/apis/contacts/
Yahoo! Contact API: http://developer.yahoo.com/addressbook/
Windows Live Contact API: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb463989.aspx

I'm glad these malpractices are getting more attention, they deserve to get the bad wrap on their wrist for these kind of infringements of respecting users' data.

Stefan Fountain on June 5, 2008 05:37 AM

Problem: The website I'm building for Acme Corporation has a single navigation, that is common to every page of the user-facing site. In order to make the site easier to manage, the navigation is one single file that's included by every page on the site. Rather than use a bread-crumb, I'd like to highlight the link in the navigation that the user is on now.

The nasty solution: Apply a server-side (PHP in this example) conditional to every item in the navigation, setting the anchor element's class to "active" if that's the page we're on:

<!-- This is included in a separate file called "nav.inc.php" -->
<ul>
  <li class="<?php if($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] == '/') echo 'active'; ?>">
    <a href="/">Home</a>
  </li>
  <li class="<?php if($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] == '/about') echo 'active'; ?>">
    <a href="/about">About Us</a>
  </li>
  <li class="<?php if($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] == '/services') echo 'active'; ?>">
    <a href="/services">Services</a>
  </li>
  <li class="<?php if($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] == '/contact') echo 'active'; ?>">
    <a href="/contact">Contact</a>
  </li>
</ul>

Hmm. Not exactly elegant.

The example above has two flaws:

1. It relies too heavily on the URL in the browser to determine which link is active – the clauses in your conditional statements could be massive if a single nav item is "active" under several URLs
2. Yes, PHP is a effectively a templating language when used on the web, but over-use of logic in template code (even using Smarty, for example) is a bad idea, especially if you have non-server-side bods working on your templates. The propensity for them to break it is higher

Enter a design pattern: We can achieve the same result with just CSS, tidier markup and no conditionals in our templates. How? Like so:

1. Set the class attribute on each distinct page or template's <body> element specific to that page or template:

   <body class="home">

   Naturally, home could be substituted with a variable assigned by [insert your programming language of choice here] before the template's parsed and presented to your user.

2. Re-mark up our navigation elements with separate class for each:

   <!-- This is included in a separate file called "nav.inc.php" -->
   <ul id="navigation">
     <li class="home"><a href="/">Home</a></li>
     <li class="about"><a href="/about">About Us</a></li>
     <li class="services"><a href="/services">Services</a></li>
     <li class="contact"><a href="/contact">Contact</a></li>
   </ul>

3. Take advantage of CSS's inheritance in place of the server-side logic to determine what's an active link:

   body.home ul#navigation li.home,
   body.about ul#navigation li.about,
   body.services ul#navigation li.services,
   body.contact ul#navigation li.contact
   {
     /**
      * Define whatever you want your active element to look like in here
      **/
   }

This second approach is significantly more elegant as it minimises the logic in your template code, and is (arguably) easier to extend should your nav grow over time.

Pertama masalah timeline, kemarin ada seorang designerku yang marah-marah karena client yang sama sekali tidak mau menambah timeline padahal spesifikasi bertambah (Untungnya PM nya bukan aku :-D ) Revisi spesifikasi yang diminta client emang gak main main, karena project yang sedang dikerjakan adalah membuat website full flash. Nambah menu satu kan merupakan perubahan major banget. Tapi gak tau client emang keras kepala atau memang gak mau ngerti. Kerjaan yang udah 80% selesai itu dia minta ubah dengan timeline yang sama. Disini sebetulnya adalah tugas PM untuk menjelaskan pada client bahwa permintaan mereka adalah sesuatu yang tidak mudah dan mempunyai konsekuensi signifikan pada timeline. Apabila timeline yang 'wajar' belum fixed antara PM dan client sebaiknya jangan di inform ke team karena selain kerja mereka tidak maksimal, kadang mereka cenderung untuk jadi bete (karena musti overtime). Masalah timeline memang selalu jadi mainan sehari-hari PM. Dan walaupun sebaik-baiknya kita bikin timeline yang appropriate, selalu saja ada masalah yang terjadi. Solusinya : selalu buat plan B just in case something happen dan adanya buffer time telah terbukti banyak membantu permasalahan dengan timeline.

Selanjutnya masalah rebutan resouces, ini bisa terjadi apabila ada lebih dari satu PM dan karena memang project yang ada di companyku selalu bejibun, sekarang kami mempunyai 3 PM. Nah, adanya PM yang lebih dari satu ini membuat kita kadang musti cepet-cepetan masukin project baru ke designer atau developer. Hal ini karena team memberlakukan first come first serve. Masalah yang muncul adalah apabila ada project lama yang tiba-tiba aktif lagi dan membutuhkan recources lama yang kadang mereka yang sudah diassigned oleh PM lain dan fully occupied. Pilihan cuma ada dua yaitu re-assigned ke developer atau ke designer atau menunggu mereka menyelesaikan project yang tengah mereka kerjakan. Sekali lagi ini tugas PM untuk bermain dan berspekulasi dengan timeline dan kemudian meminta persetujuan client dengan timeline yang kita ajukan. Kalau aku secara pribadi sih aku mendingan nunggu developer/ designer awal available karena kalau ada perubahan resources aku musti menjelaskan lagi spesifikasi project (kalau misalnya spec project tidak terlalu ribet sih gak papa, tapi kebanyakan membutuhkan penjelasan panjang lebar karena full customized). Tapi kalau ternyata timeline sangat tight ya gak ada pilihan lain selain re-assigned ke developer/ designer baru. Disini kemampuan PM diuji sejauh mana dia mengetahui project dan detail-detail yang ada.

Yang terakhir adalah masalah email. Aku sering sekali kena complain karena client mengatakan aku tidak pernah memberikan update dari project mereka atau karena aku missed the deadline etc etc. Padahal aku telah memberikan notifikasi dan update mereka sebelumnya via email. Thanks to Spam filter for this. Aku sudah banyak menemui masalah gara-gara spam filter ini, emailku ternyata berakhir di Junk atau Spam folder sehingga client tidak menerima update project mereka dan akhirnya complain lah mereka ke top management :( Untuk menghindari hal ini terjadi biasanya aku selalu menginformasikan kepada client untuk selalu mem- white-listed emailku dan menambahkan kalimat di bawah email ku untuk selalu confirm after receive.

Masalah-masalah lain sebetulnya pasti ada case by case, tetapi secara general tiga hal itulah yang commonly happened for me as a PM.

19:00

Met up with parents at Chili's Too. Dad is not prepared, he has hidden his 3oz bottles of liquid from himself. There is no 802.11 at the restaurant. Ate a burger; that has got to be the 3rd burger I have eaten this week. Go me and my new health plan. I did however drink lemonade and not a coke (still trying to figure out why I didn't get an iced tea, I guess after 25 years mom still doesn't know what I drink). Oh yeah, this is 3 weeks I think with no soft drinks.

20:45

Security checkpoint, I hate these. This time I am ready:

• I have my liquids up front and ready to be pulled out.
• I have mentally cataloged everything on my person that is metal and will need to be removed.
• My shoes are untied and ready to be removed.

I throw all of my stuff into bins and then....SHUT DOWN! Little did I know that there were separate lines for the level of traveler you are. I picked the winner. There was a lady in front of me that honestly had taken off every piece of accessory she had on, anything being used to keep her clothes on, and she still kept setting off the metal detector. I stood there as my bags came out the other side of the machine and slid further out of my reach. Meanwhile, this woman is dumbfounded. But wait! "Oh yeah, my knee brace, but why would it set the alarm off?" Uh, MAYBE BECAUSE IT HAS METAL IN IT!!!!!!! Holy shit, how do you not feel a piece of metal (or two) strapped to your knee, probably restricting your movement? Christ!

21:50

In the air now, it's a pretty empty flight. I just got done using Dreamweaver to cheat on my homework. Not cheat really, I just didn't know how center an image. I did learn something however, make the image a

and align center, nothing to do with CSS. Problem solved.

Flight fare: Cheese Nips, peanuts, and a can of water. Can of water?!

22:30

Plane appears to be falling from the sky and my battery is dying. I didn't bring and extra to save on weight and the assumption that I would never be too far away from a power source. Little did I know that this is my shitty battery and its health is only 73%.

23:15

On the ground and out the door. That was the fastest flight I have ever been on it seems like. Picked up rental car and drove out looking for Wal-Mart. I can't begin to explain how bad of mistake that was. First one: closed. Who the hell closes a Wal-Mart? Second one: empty and moved. Where is it now? We have 2 iPhones and a Garmin Nuvi all telling us something different.

A note about the Nuvi. A simple task of entering the name of the road was a catastrophic failure. We were looking for George (something) Blvd. When you hit space to start the second word, it prompts you for a St, Cir, etc. Why would it do that? My only guess is that it is only searching in the names of your general location but this road was in our location. I am totally lost on why it would do something like that. I hope it can be removed in a later firmware.

We finally locate one but it is now time to pick up the rest of the family and head to Grandpa's house. Pontiac Vibe vs. 6 people. It was a very tight fit.

I guess this is now a not-so-live-blog now that it is 4 days old. Oh well, I'm still trying to catch up.