Blog
Jan. 31, 2010
CheddarGetter for Python and Django
We believe in the philosophy of not reinventing the wheel if we don't have to. That's why we use Django as our development framework. And that's why we decided to use CheddarGetter - a web service that takes care of all of our recurring credit card billing. We wrote a wrapper for CheddarGetter in Python, called PyCheddar, and have released it as open source so others can take advantage of it as well.
Dec. 11, 2009
Mastering Custom Segmentation in Google Analytics
Google has made some major strides in adding new features to Google Analytics over the past year. I used to recommend Google Analytics for basic tracking needs and Omniture (which is expensive) for when custom user tracking or goal conversion was required. After spending some time playing with the new custom variables and segmentation features in Google Analytics, I think I can say that for the vast majority of websites I've worked on - even those run by large enterprise companies with complex requirements - Google Analytics is all you need. And the best part is, it's free.
Nov. 19, 2009
Simple JavaScript Date Formatting
This week, in anticipation of our alpha launch, Jason asked me to write a mechanism for giving a user the ability to embed one of our feeds on their webpage. You know the drill here; we give them a box of code to copy and paste onto their page, and then after that it just sort of magically works. Anyway, in the process of doing this, I was at a point where I wanted to format what the date and time would look like.
Jason and I do a pretty good job of talking about what's coming around the corner, and he'd mentioned to me in passing that one thing he'd like in the future is a mechanism to allow the user to customize what the time formatting looked like, so I wanted to make sure I planned for that in advance. So, this morning I took on the challenge of taking a JavaScript date object (created from an integer Unix timestamp) and formatting it.
I decided that the best use of time was probably just to write a function to take a date and output it in an arbitrary way, rather than hard-coding the exact formatting we were going to use to start. That would allow me to easily accept an arbitrary format later, and also allow Jason some flexibility if he didn't like how one of the formats looked when he saw the final page; he could just edit the format string rather than asking me to revisit the date formatter.
Nov. 13, 2009
Grid Design with Sass
We are a little fanatical about grid-design with FeedMagnet.com. We spend time making sure every element of our pages lines up to the pixel with the grid. There are a number of tools that can be used for grid design in CSS, but we chose to use a couple tools that are still a little less common among designers - Sass and Compass - because of the flexibility they provide.
Nov. 9, 2009
Django vs. Rails
One of our first tasks getting started building FeedMagnet was to pick a development framework. I built the original prototype of FeedMagnet in PHP because it was the language I knew. When I decided to hire a developer and build out a production version of FeedMagnet, I knew I didn't want to stick with PHP for a number of reasons - the main one being that I wanted to develop in a top-notch framework and I didn't feel like CakePHP and CodeIgniter were quite there yet. I've had a number of people ask me how I made the ultimate decision to go with Django, so I decided to write this post to answer that question and hopefully help others who end up in my shoes to make the right decision.
