One Zombie in a Billion

Spent a good chunk of this weekend playing with the Django web framework, it’s frankly the best web app creation framework I’ve ever used. I love the use of a url configuration file to make requests to a db and serve out a page, as opposed to the old method of rolling code into physical files. This just feels so much cleaner than a server cluttered with asp and php files.

I’m working on transferring this blog over to Django from wordpress/php, so far I’ve worked on it for about 2 hours and I’m almost done, thanks to Django’s wonderful admin suite which is built as you create your application. As I say, it’s an amazing platform. I’ll be using this opportunity to work on properly working with Microformats and better integration with the RSS feeds provided by the other services I subscribe to…oh it’s going to be awesome fun!

No matter how long I’ve lived around the prestonfield area, the sound of foxes barking and peacocks yelping still freaks me out…

Just something I’ve noticed with the Asp.Net label control that a few developers don’t seem to have when I check the source code.

In the attempt to make Visual Studio web development more like Application development, text can be added to a page by developers using a label control, which renders out a span tag with a custom id created at runtime. I want to stress, that these aren’t required everywhere you want text…the amount of asp.net apps I’ve seen online that over-use this element is just crazy, it clutters up source code and will no doubt bloat your build time.

The other thing is when you’re developing forms, please add a label with AssociatedControlID before each form element, this makes the label render out as an html label element for the text box, it’s just good mark up folks.

Minor quibbles as I say. The major ones are to do with the compilation and deployment of .Net websites as a bin library of dll files, which is a nightmare when you just need to do minor changes, you need to upload the entire site every time. I really need to look up a solution for that.

I know it’s on a random cycle, but it still put a wee smile on me face when I visited the @Media website and saw this:

In retrospect, something more insightful would have looked better, but I’m still well chuffed at making the website.