Maker of real and digital things.
For a while now, I’ve been looking for a good vinyl decal for my 13″ MacBook Air. Etsy has a bunch of great ones but none really capture the nostalgia or emotion that I want.
Tonight during the Patriots/Chiefs football game I created a few Atari 2600 inspired designs. I chose three of the games that I played a lot as a kid. I will probably pick one of these and cut my own decal unless someone chimes in with a good alternative.
Remote capture webcam images
I’ve had this WiFi enabled webcam looking down my driveway for over a year now. Since I work at home, it’s great for monitoring when deliveries, Jehova’s Witnesses and family members approach the house.
It is also useful for checking on home when I am away on vacation. I have grown to rely on it daily and I keep a small browser window with the video stream always up on one of my work monitors.
Up until this week, however, I didn’t remotely save any captured data from the camera. After reading about a home break-in over the weekend I decided to fix this. Below are the steps to quickly and easily store and display a series of 5-minute increment snapshot from your home webcam to a remote server.
How to import a CSV file into Django
Recently I downloaded a US zip code data file in comma separated (CSV) format. Below are the steps and python script that I used to import that data into a django model for my site Wantbox.com.
The Steps to Import CSV Data into Django:
python ./load_data.py”That’s it. For a CSV file with about 42,000 rows this import took about 15 seconds. You can verify that the data loaded correctly by checking your django admin.
We’ve heard it many times before: Google loves fast loading websites. Towards the end of this past June, I completed a move of my site Wantbox from a Dreamhost shared server to a dedicated Linode virtual server.
I really like Dreamhost’s hosting service, their nice dashboard and great customer service, but Wantbox had grown beyond shared hosting. I needed an environment that I could fully control and could no longer tolerate the downtime caused by other sites on my shared server.
I chose to move to Linode because of the competitive price, the positive experience from some friends and the great Django/Apache/MySQL StackScript setup script by Filip.
Perceptually, I noticed that the pages seemed to be loading faster, and confirmed an approximate 35% page load improvement using WebPageTest.org.
My site Wantbox (find someone for remodeling the bathroom) recently recovered from a sitewide Google algorithmic penalty. With Google, you never know for sure why you were penalized, but after reading a lot of posts, interacting with a few SEO experts and doing some thoughtful head scratching I made a bunch of changes to the site and waited it out.
In the end, I believe that Google felt I had too many links from my online birth announcement site into Wantbox. I removed most of the links and added “rel=nofollow” to the remaining ones. I admitted my error in a reconsideration request to Google (Google’s response to my request included below), documented specifically what I had done to fix the problem and waited it out.
Below is the graph of how the Google penalty played out. I wasn’t surprised by the 90-day duration of the penalty: I had read other reports of similar link-based actions. I didn’t expect, however, the gradual ramp-back of the the “penalty release” period. In all, it took about 4 months to get back to normal traffic.
Source: Clicky Search Traffic (my favorite analytics service)
It seems like every time I setup a new Django project, I spend an inordinate amount of time getting the site and admin media (IMG, CSS, JS) to display correctly in my templates.
It doesn’t help that I haven’t standardized on a best-practices Django layout. Dreamhost shared servers require one site structure while the Linode StackScript I use (thanks Filip) suggests another. A move from Django 1.2 to 1.3 hasn’t helped either.
On my home development environment (Debian in VirtualBox on Windows), I use Nginx to serve static media for my Django development server. Although this improves my dev server performance, it complicates the setup of a new environment.
AJAX in Django using jQuery
I recently created a side project to explore a few tech areas I wanted to learn more thoroughly. One of those areas was how to implement AJAX in Django using jQuery.
In a nutshell, the site, TruthTruthLie.me (update 3/5/2013: the site is temporarily offline as switch my Facebook Connect implementation from django-socialregistration to django-social-auth) presents three facts about you and challenges your friends to click on the one that is a lie.
When your friend clicks on a fact, I send the clicked fact_id via AJAX to a url. A Django url pattern routes the click to a view where I check what “type” the fact is, return the result via JSON to the client and update the page dynamically without a page refresh.
Yesterday I attended day two of Distilled’s Pro SEO Seminar in Boston. Once again, the lineup of speakers was impressive and the tips, tricks and advice was mind-blowingly awesome.
I have so many notes, ideas and tests to try coming out of this conference that I’m looking into cloning myself as an SEO intern. We all saw how well that worked out for Michael Keaton’s character in Multipicity.
Similar to the Day One Pro SEO Seminar recap that I posted yesterday, as I track down the slides for each presentation I will link to them here. If you attended, please feel free to leave updates in the comments and I will elevate them to the post if appropriate. Each presenter’s Twitter account is linked below. Follow them.
Pro SEO Seminar Boston
Today I took a break from working on my newly launched Django website TruthTruthlie.me to attend the first day of the Distilled Pro SEO Seminar in Boston.
After reading all the great feedback and presentations from Distilled’s Link Love conferences in London and New Orleans, I was thrilled when they announced that the traveling SEO circus would be rolling through Boston.
Day one didn’t disappoint, with great presentations from Rand Fishkin, Justin Briggs and half a dozen other excellent presenters. Since I am a primarily a web developer who happens to love SEO, I particularly enjoyed Will Critchlow’s presentation describing the tools, sites and APIs that he leverages to get the data he needs to excel at SEO. Very geeky and very powerful. Loved it.
SEOmoz bot tattoo
Apparently I wasn’t the most excited person to be there, however, as seminar attendee @RebeccaSlosberg expressed her undying love for Rand and SEOmoz by getting the SEOmoz bot tattooed on her shoulder. Yes, it is indeed a permanent outpouring of love for Roger.
Unfortunately, the merciless Boston traffic, exacerbated by a light rain and neverending construction, caused me to miss the first 20 minutes of the seminar. I did catch everything after that, however, and my notes are below.
Getting the floats, widths, paddings and margins of your divs just right in a complex page layout can oftentimes be a huge PITA. If you aren’t using one of the many full-featured web developer browser extensions, one of my favorite quick CSS tricks is to create a “debug” class which lets me easily see the borders of my divs:
.debug { border:1px dashed red; }
This allows me to simply add “debug” to any div’s existing class list and see what is happening on the page. Example:
<div class="container debug">
<div class="main debug">blah, blah...</div>
<div class="nav debug">nav blah...</div>
</div>
<div class="footnote debug">blah, blah...</div>
I am a get-your-hands-dirty maker of real and digital things
I love music, technology, woodworking, intermittent fasting and as much politics as I can stomach. I am a student of Django, Xcode, SEO and guitar.
I grew up in St. Johnsbury, VT, and came south to study Economics, Art and Math at Boston College and then Architecture at Harvard University. I live just west of Boston in Wellesley, MA.
Recent Comments