This is the first post in the Django series published on solutoire.com. In the series I’ll discuss and solve some of the problems I ran across while struggling with Python and Django in particular. The subjects are handled in a fast pace and the posts in this series will get you up and running quickly. The posts will mainly consist of code examples and a few explanations. Most of the time I’ll refer to other websites for thorough explanations.

In this post I’ll explain how to create a custom log in page. We’ll write our own view function and form that handles the authentication. In the next post I’ll explain how to create a custom authentication backend, that lets you log in users by their email addresses instead of their username.

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I’m currently working with Django for a personal project. Django is a web framework written in Python that encourages rapid development and clean, pragmatic design. The Django website says it is “The Web framework for perfectionists with deadlines. Django makes it easier to build better Web apps more quickly and with better code.”. That’s exactly the reason I decided to fool around with Django and Python. While I’m an experienced PHP programmer, Python is not as hard to learn like I thought it would be.

In the next few weeks I’ll be releasing a series of posts in which I’ll discuss and solve some of the problems I ran across while struggling with Python and Django in particular. The first post covers writing a custom authentication backend. The second post will learn you everything about extending the default Django User object and how to combine it with the custom authentication backend. If you have special requests for explanation of topics related to Django (that are hardly documented), please let me know by leaving a comment.

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Ever used conditional statements/comments in your html? I do, actually, use the technique quite a lot (this site, Flotr). With HTML conditional comments you can detect browser type and version. Now don’t get too excited, because it’s only supported by Internet Explorer 5+ on Windows. Nevertheless, this way of browser detection is really elegant compared to nasty css hacks or javascript user agent detection. This article is shows you how you can use the conditional comments for several handy purposes.

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Despite of the fact I’m always hungry for new feeds with interesting articles, I’m not able to find any new feeds lately. I asked for help from Google Alerts, which notifies me when the GoogleBot hits something I defined an alert for. Though it doesn’t come up with great content I’m looking for. That’s the reason I’d like to ask you for helping me out, because obviously I’m looking at the wrong spot. In exchange I show you 10 of my favorite feeds.

Grab the Solutoire.com feed!

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I’m optimizing this blog at the moment, and I’m learning quite some new things about compression, gzipping and other optimization techniques. I’m using the Yahoo! YSlow extension for Firefox to see if I’m heading in the right direction. In this article I’ll explain the three best techniques I used to speed up solutoire.com.

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Well, I’m a bit late, but happy new year to all! A new year has begun, so it’s time to write some sort of roadmap, to get straight what I want to accomplish the coming year. I”m not going to bother you with the complete list, but there are a few points that might be interesting for you.

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Today I came across a great Firefox plugin called ReminderFox. This plug in adds a reminder list and a todolist to our favorite browser. Just what I needed, and I’m sharing this because this might come in handy for you too.

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I started working on Plotr again and I needed a simple way to automate tasks like concatenating files,replacing some variables and packing with Dean Edwards packer. Then I found Apache Ant, which was already integrated in Aptana (which is my favorite javascript IDE).

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Hi there, this is the first post since the new design of solutoire.com. I’m writing about web2.0 podcasts. I find myself listening lots of podcasts the last few months and I thought maybe I should share my opinions about them, and show you where to find good podcasts.

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I haven’t updated ajax.solutoire.com for a while, but lately I had some time to work on it. So I rewrote the page from scratch. It’s more lightweight than before. I also added like 100 new resources. I’ll promise to keep it more up-to-date now… Please take a visit and see it yourself.