Or how to use the benefits of Django template system during the PSD to HTML phase

There are two main approaches to start designing a new project - Photoshop mock-up or an HTML prototype. The first one is more traditional and well established in the web industry. The second one is more alternative and (maybe)modern. I remember a video of Jason Fried from 37 Signals where he talks about design and creativity. You can see it at http://davegray.nextslide.com/jason-fried-on-design. There he explains how he stays away from the Photoshop in the initial phase to concetrate on the things that you can interact with instead of focusing on design details.

I am not planning to argue which is the better method, the important thing here is that sooner or later you get to the point where you have to start the HTML coding. Unfortunately frequently this happens in a pure HTML/CSS environment outside of the Django project and then we waste some extra amount of time to convert it to Django templates.

Wouldn't be awesome if you can give the front-end developers something that they can install/run with a simple command and still to allow them to work in the Django environment using all the benefits it provides - templates nesting and including, sekizai tags etc.

I have been planning to do this for a long time and finally it is ready and is available at Django for Prototyping. Currently the default template includes Modernizr, jQuery and jQuery UI but you can easily modify it according to your needs. I would be glad of any feedback and ideas of improvement so feel free to try it and comment.

This presentation shows the basics of Django - what is inside the framework and explains the Model-View-Template system. One of the most important parts is a diagram how the request is processed and the response is generated. Shows the project and the application structure and the basic elements - Models, URLs dispatcher, Views and Templates.

After some delay(please excuse me for it) here are sample solutions of the problems defined in the presentation Functions in Python. Solutions are also available at GitHub.

Here is my presentation part of the in company Python course.

The last slide - "Problem to solve" is something like a simple homework. Sample solutions will be uploaded later this week.

Preface: Nine months ago(I can't believe it was that long) I created a script called Simple Site Checker to ease the check of sitemaps for broken links. The script code if publicly available at Github. Yesterday(now when I finally found time to finish this post it must be "A few weeks ago") I decided to run it again on this website and nothing happened - no errors, no warning, nothing. Setting the output level to DEBUG showed the following message "Loading sitemap ..." and exited.
Here the fault was mine, I have missed a corner case in the error catching mechanism i.e. when the sitemap URL returns something different from "200 OK" or "500 internal server error". Just a few second and the mistake was fix.

Problem and Solution: I ran the script again and what a surprise the sitemap URL was returning "403 Forbidden". At the same time the sitemap was perfectly accessible via my browser. After some thinking I remembered about that some security plugins block the access to the website if there is not User-Agent header supplied. The reason for this is to block the access of simple script. In my case even an empty User-Agent did the trick to delude the plugin.

urllib2.urlopen(urllib2.Request(url,
                                headers={'User-Agent': USER_AGENT}))

Final words: As a result of the issue mention above one bug in simple site checker was found fixed. At the same time another issue about missing status and progress was raised, more details can be found at Github but in a few words an info message was added to each processed URL to indicate the progress.

If you have any ideas for improvement or anything else feel free to comment, create issues and/or fork the script.