September, 2005

If It Doesn’t Buzz

Jeremy Jones, writing for O’Reilly states “I was compelled enough to give TurboGears a spin. Why? I watched the TurboGears video.”. As much as it pains me to admit it, that’s largely what got me to try TurboGears too.

I’ve already written about searching for a Web application framework, and last weekend I spent most of Friday night and all of Saturday (much to my wife’s consternation) searching for a really good platform I could build on. I wanted to build on JSP because of the really cool tag library support (I still think this is a critical addition to something like TurboGears), but there was no way I could ever justify (or probably afford) a hosting account that allowed me to run JSPs. Read If It Doesn’t Buzz »

TurboGears are Super Cool

I’ve been exploring TurboGears since Saturday when I first ran across it.

It’s amazing just how quick it is to create a small Web application. I haven’t yet expanded my scope beyond small samples, but I can easily see how this framework (or mega-framework as it’s being called by others) will be invaluable for a project I’m working on.

Get Ground Up by TurboGears

I just finished watching the 20 minute screen cast of TurboGears. Now I’m eager to download it and try it out.

I actually spent most of this weekend looking for a decent Web development environment — I don’t do Perl or PHP (I think they’re both craptacular languages) — and although I’d rather use JavaScript on the server side, I think Python will be an interesting twist.

Shortcut Element Access

Typing out document.getElementById can get a little tedious after a while. One of the best alternatives I’ve seen takes advantage of a little known feature of Javascript (and oddly enough C/C++ and possible Java): the dollar sign ($) is a valid identifier character.

Consider the following code:

I’ve Embraced My Bottom

In a recent article on his Web site, Derek Powazek recommends embracing the bottom of the page. I’ve whipped up a redesigned version of this site taking these ideas to heart.

A redesign of newburyportion that embraces the bottom of the page