I have to try, I know my brain will explode if I add another language in there but I love to play.

Resources

• ActivePython

• Django Web Framework

• Google Search - WSGI

Python Web Apps

• OnaSwarm Beta

• ChicagoCrime

Notes

Mod_Python: Plugin to speed up rendering performance

From an early age I became interested in computing, the wonder of building stuff, getting things to work and showing off to your friends.

It was very much a dark art back then, you subscribed to the latest tech journals, got amazed by hardware specs (jeezus!! 10mb of RAM!!) and tried to beat everyone at DOOM; times were great.

Things have moved on a bit since then but there’s still that wonder for creating the impossible, the thing no-one’s tried to do that drives you. You stay up late at night coding away just to see what would happen if X = Y and R loops thru P once too often; the challenge of getting your code bullet-proof, unbreakable; solid gold! then releasing it into the wild to prove your that good.

Nowadays it’s practically addictive, SubVersion helps a lot, everytime you check in a new release you shout YES as you can see yourself moving closer to those goalposts; getting to the next level, defeating the big boss and finding out what’s on the end of the rainbow.

Programming should be fun no matter what you’re building, that’s why we do it and that’s why we love it and the open-source movement has helped a lot to make this our reality.

Sure, the .COM boom was a bad day in history, but it needed to happen just to clear the way for the second wave of web evolution. Creating companies like 37Signals who in turn pushed out Ruby on Rails so that we could be more productive, coders love new toys and this is one of the biggest toy-boxes ever!

Today there are so many like-minded individuals, friends, colleagues, trying to push the envelope. It’s evolution on an atomic scale and if you can get paid to do what you love things can be pretty sweet!

So shout down to those bullies in the school-yard who smirk at your little science groups and geek dinners…

Being a coder ROCKS!

This stuff is really cool… after doing some more research into writing rails code the right way I managed to bump into a rocking thing called HAML via the Railscasts & Peepcode video tutorial sites.

Introduction

Before I continue, may I say thank you to Geoffery Grosenbach for his TopFunky Ruby on Rails Field Guide, an excellent piece of work and has really helped to answer the questions that some books leave un-checked; well done!

You can get this by purchasing one of Geoffrey’s Peepcode videos at link also suggest you watch his blog at Nuby on Rails

HAML, SASS & IE Conditionals

Now if you’ve got your feet wet with Rails development you’ll have coded .RHTML files and know what they’re about, they’re programmatically generated content pages the user sees, along with the div tags, css and generated Javascript. But like everything else, .NET, ASP, etc they don’t give you some help when coding the opening & closing tags.

Thankfully HAML is at hand, it’s a plugin to Ruby which basically allows you to create the generated view pages and essentially not have to worry about closing any tags you’ve left open or remembering how to write P-aragraph tags correctly, try it out and you’ll be amazed at how fast and small you’re development time gets.

install via…
bq. ./script/plugin install http://svn.hamptoncatlin.com/haml/tags/stable

Now along with this there’s SASS which does what HAML does to CSS generation, damn cool!

Along with this there’s IE Conditionals, which are essentially pieces of code you can put in your .RHTML / .HAML files so to do things particular to IE browser users.

IE Conditionals

Have a look, HAML also supports these quick & easy link

With all the cool new things and well thought out processes, you know, things done right, Ruby on Rails really shines as something not to miss out on, and at the very least may force a change in other languages much like Firefox did to IE.

…but in a good way, ;-)