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Sunday, January 27 2008

  • Going Places… again!

    Posted 5 months, 1 week ago.

    1 comments

    Just a quick post to let everyone know that I’ve updated django-geo to version 1.1. This adds a number of enhancements, foremost of which are in the geocoding components.

    Previously, to save myself time and effort I had used the excellent geopy‘s geocoders to lookup co-ordinates for a place. This worked well; as long as all you need is co-ordinates. What if you need to get the precision of the result? You don’t want to be zooming down to street-level if you’ve got a city-level geocoding response. It’s near impossible to deduce from a latitude/longitude (in the way they were stored) how precise a result was. So, I’ve written my own suite for geocoding that makes it ridiculously easy to get all kinds of juicy data from any XML geocoder you can throw a stick at, and make new geocoders in only a few lines of code.

Wednesday, December 19 2007

  • Django: Going Places

    Posted 6 months, 2 weeks ago.

    1 comments

    For me, one of the most useful features I have seen in a web application is geo-tagging of content: Flickr does it (incredibly well), YouTube does it (although not very well), Wikipedia does it. But yet I see so few personal and blog sites (excluding the “geo-aware elite”) making use of it.

    That’s why I’ve released django-geo on Google Code.

Friday, June 29 2007

  • Moving On

    Posted 1 year ago.

    3 comments

    Well, tomorrow I’m off. I’m moving away from my hometown of Retford, in Nottinghamshire, to start afresh as it were in Penzance, down in Cornwall.

    I know that at the moment that I’m not thinking objectively, and my perception of the situation is at best very clouded — but I really never imagined that I would be so sad to leave this place.

    Sure, Retford’s no paradise; it has its fair few problems, and I’m usually the first to point out these flaws (as I’m sure everyone my age does in small-town Britain ;-), but at the same time it’s where I’ve made all my friends. It’s where I’ve proven myself to the people. It’s all I’ve really known.

    Moving’s been a definite thing for over a year now. About 2 years ago, my parents (mother and stepfather) decided that they wanted to be in Cornwall. It’s not exactly difficult to see why, either: sun, sand and a more relaxed way of life (well, that’s the theory anyway :-). Understandably, I wasn’t really consulted as to whether I wanted to move — it’s none of my business anyway… if they want to move then they definitely should (sure, they care whether I want to move, but I couldn’t, and wouldn’t want to, stop them). They’ve certainly worked hard enough over the past few years, and I really do thank them for all they’ve done for me and helped me to do, at times it’s certainly been difficult, but I like to think I generally have a pretty good relationship with both of them. That’s not to say I don’t like my independence though (and they generally let me have it as far as possible.)

Monday, April 23 2007

  • FOWD: My Thoughts

    Posted 1 year, 2 months ago.

    5 comments

    I know that I’m a little late in getting this review posted — the event was nearly a week ago now — but what the hell?

    If you’ve read my previous post then I’m sure you’ll know that last week I went to the Future of Web Design conference in Kensington, London. My overall impression of the event was that it was a fantastic. In short, there were loads of interesting and varied speakers, coming from all disciplines of web design, and plenty of discussion based around the points they raised — really good stuff.

    Though there were some speakers who didn’t particularly interest me personally (the one about the Windows Presentation Foundation to name one), most of it was brilliantly put-together — even if some of them did have to cut out some of the content because of time constraints.

    So, in no particular order, here is a quick list of the panels I personally found of the most interest to me (I’ll elaborate on these in a minute):

    1. Ryan Singer (37Signals), George Oates (Flickr), Denise Wilton (Moo) — Designing for Web Apps
    2. Jeff Croft (World Online), Florian Schmitt (HiReS!) — Standards vs. Flash
    3. Nat Hunter (Airside) — Integrated Design across Different Media
    4. Rai Inamoto (AKQA) — Branding and Identity
    5. Joshua Hirsch (Big Spaceship) — Creating award-winning Online Marketing Campaigns

    As I said, I enjoyed nearly all of the presentations — these are just the ones I enjoyed above all!

Wednesday, April 11 2007

  • Off to FOWD

    Posted 1 year, 2 months ago.

    0 comments

    Well, the time’s finally come. About this time next week, I, along with a few hundred others, will be off to the Future of Web Design Conference in Kensington, London. I’m really excited about going, and after a bit of a panic trying to get a ticket at the last minute, everything’s booked and I’m all revved up to go.

    Business Cards

    Business Cards Seeing as I’ll (hopefully) be meeting lots of cool people there, I thought it might be high-time to get some Business Cards printed — click on the image to see the full PDF. I don’t really have a lot of cash left over after spending:

    • £100 on my ticket to the Conference
    • £80 on the train fare to Kings Cross
    • and £10 on an Oyster Card

    So I had to go for something cheap (i.e. VistaPrint)… with Business Cards at £12.99 (£3.99 in my case — their system sent me an email offering me a huge discount about 20 seconds before I hit buy and gave them the £12.99, hehe), I do have serious reservations about the quality of the product (paper especially) — but either way, it’s still something to give to people at the Conference with which to remember me by.

Thursday, February 1 2007

  • Tag Clouds à la Django

    Posted 1 year, 5 months ago.

    2 comments

    When I relaunched the site on Monday, one of the long overdue additions was that of a Tag Cloud. However, I really couldn’t find any good, realistic tutorials on how to do this with Django - but when you know how it really isn’t hard at all.

    As I knew that on Jeff Croft‘s previous design he had a tag cloud, I emailed him to ask him how he’d done it. However, his old code ran on the pre-magic-removal version of Django, rendering it unusable in its previous state. He did however, point me to a very interesting filter Django provides: widthratio. Originally intended for calculating the heights’ of bars in charts etc, this filter basically just returns an integer’s percentage, in comparison to another integer.

    So, as a tag cloud is basically a list displaying a weighted set of results, with the more important tags appearing larger, I would need mechanisms to:

    1. Calculate a tag’s importance
    2. Calculate the maximum importance of a tag (to compare an individual importance value against)

    And Django would do the rest!

Monday, January 29 2007

  • Oops, I Did It Again

    Posted 1 year, 5 months ago.

    2 comments

    As you can probably see, I’ve redesigned the site (yes, again) with a brand new look. It’s not that I didn’t like the old one, it was more the case that I:

    1. Wanted a more grown-up design
    2. Really wanted it to work in IE
    3. Wanted to add some more features

    I started redesigning this around Christmas time, and since then have completely overhauled most of the back-end, and all the front-end. So, here’s a quick outline of the features I’ve changed:

    1. I’ve added the ‘Elsewhere’ section
    2. I’ve added the ‘Browse’ section
    3. I built a search engine for Django
    4. Every object (except for stuff in ‘Elsewhere’) has tags, which can be seen in cloud form in the ‘Browse’ section
    5. I’ve added related items to everything, so you can dig up stuff you never even knew was here
    6. There are numerous other, less major changes, which you’ll easily find by having a dig around.

    That’s quite a changeset! So let’s go through some of these in more detail.

Thursday, January 4 2007

  • Django: Template Tags

    Posted 1 year, 6 months ago.

    1 comments

    One of the most useful things about Django is it’s template system - it makes more sense to me than any other method I’ve ever used before, and that included WordPress’ (which I developed a very intimate understanding of) and Smarty.

    One of the most useful features in Django is the concept of inheritance. Basically, this is how you can have a “base” template, and then extend it with “children”. This means it is super-easy to change the entire look of your site, just by changing one or two files, and leaving the children templates alone. If you’re interested in knowing more about inheritance in Django, check out Jeff Croft‘s very well-written post on the subject.

    Aside from inheritance, Django provides some excellent tags in its templates for doing various things. Here’s a quick rundown of what I consider the top 4 most useful ones:

    • for and if (obviously)
    • cycle
    • ifchanged
    • All of Django’s filters

    Obviously, this is a very shortened list of Django’s features - but these are the ones I keep finding myself using again and again.

Sunday, December 17 2006

  • Custom View Pagination in Django

    Posted 1 year, 6 months ago.

    7 comments

    Here’s the scenario: you are using a custom view function to display some of your data from the database, and you want to use Pagination, so you don’t end up with whacking great lists of content which seem to go on forever. As you probably already know, Django provides a Pagination framework which will do all the heavy lifting for you. In addition, the Paginator is extremely efficient at what it does, which means that there is no reason that you’d want to write a custom function just to paginate your items.

    Again, as you are probably aware, Django’s generic views are already geared to take full advantage of the Paginator. But that isn’t really a lot of help to you as you are using a custom view which you have written yourself. So, what do you do?

Monday, December 11 2006

  • Evolution

    Posted 1 year, 6 months ago.

    1 comments

    It’s been a year now since oBeattie was launched. Now it’s being relaunched. Built on my new platform of choice, Django, you should see that a lot has happened around here.

    Probably the most obvious change is the absence of all my previous posts. With moving to a new content management system, it would have been near impossible to move over all of my old posts to Django. Most were junk anyway, but some were good posts which were well-received. So, in the coming weeks, I will go over my old posts, re-post some of the better, more interesting ones, and just not bother migrating the filler. Additionally, for those of you who for some reason love filler, I will be bringing back the old blog in a subdomain - watch out for a post about that when it happens.

    Anyway, enough of that banter. oBeattie now sports a more grown-up design, which borrows some of its elements from Radical, my previous theme for WordPress (yeah, the spatter made the cut). This one, I feel, better reflects the way things are changing, and the way my design tastes are both growing up and just.. well… changing.

    As well as the new design, there’s a less obvious change. The move to Django. I know to a lot of people that may not mean an awful lot, but believe me - this was a huge step forward for me. Now, you will notice that I have all my Flickr photos and faves. I also have all my Magnolia links, all waiting there, ready to be commented and trawled though. Now, this means that the site is more of a portal of my online self. It brings together content from the places which I store my most beloved photos and links - and displays them right here.

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Recent Links

  • Sidebar Creative redesigns, too!

    0 comments

    ‘Tis the season to redesign it seems. Again, lovely work (fantastic colour scheme + attention to detail) — but, what else would I expect from such a talented set of developers?

  • Engadget

    0 comments

    Engadget redesigns — much fresher and cleaner, I must say.

  • Django Plugables

    0 comments

    Yet another one of Bryan‘s astoundingly cool sites that “brings all of Django’s pluggable applications under one roof”. django-geo is on there too (as well as on github as of today, too) :D

  • Archer

    0 comments

    The one font I’ve been wanting literally forever — it’s here! I’ve so bought it.

  • Everyblock — About our maps

    0 comments

    Really interesting (and, thankfully, techie) post about how Everyblock put together their fantastic maps. I’ll certainly be checking out some of the stuff on there (I had no idea that there was this kind of stuff freely available as open-source — I was under the impression I would have to roll-my-own in future projects!)

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