Tumblog archive for December

A great article on using PayPal within Django. Currently for WhisperGifts I create an encrypted button, however this means the users' end-point is the PayPal website. Using the snippets linked to from this article, the user sees PayPal as a single step and the final end-point is on your own website, giving you more control over the checkout process.

Tony Hauber has put together a fantastic pluggable application for Django which allows you to manage events, including recurring events. This will be very useful for an upcoming project where I've hacked together my own recurring event framework that's absurdly messy. Recurring events are hard to get right, but it appears Tony has got it right here.

James Bennett has written this great article on adding user controls to your Django admin screens: Only allow users to see and edit their own content, unless they're a superuser.

A great example of what's possible with the 'new' admin - just don't ignore his wise advice: "*that’s a problem no amount of technology will solve for you: if you can’t rely on your site administrators to do the right thing, then they shouldn’t be your site administrators. *"

Jannis Leidel has put together this useful blog post which shows how to use jQuery to provide autosuggest on your django-tagging fields in Django, in both the automatic Admin screens and in your own custom forms.

The only real downside I can see is that it sends the entire tag list with the initial request, so if you have hundreds or thousands of tags then it wouldn't be overly bandwidth-friendly. In those situations it should be relatively easy to modify this to use an XMLHttpRequest, though.

Nice work, Jannis!

One of the many reasons I haven't been online much recently is a new deck out the front of our house, an area which until now was just gravel and mud.

After building it myself over about 3-4 months of weekends I'm glad it's done - and I've got a new-found appreciation for my job and for the job of builders. It's nice to get away from the computer and work on something physical as it gives you instant feedback and a real sense of progress.

My next job is to landscape my (very steep) back yard to turn it into a usable space. I'm guessing by the time I'm done I'll have a great appreciation for landscape gardeners, too :)

On top of all the usual taxes any small business pays, Australian craft breweries have to fork out 25% of their sales income straight to the taxation office in the form of excise.

By comparison, small Australian wineries can sell up to $1.7m of wine per year without paying WET. Like wineries, most microbreweries are regional family-owned businesses. By increasing the excise refund for microbreweries to levels closer to that of the wineries, more microbreweries can afford to produce even better beer by employing expert brewers, purchasing better equipment, and accessing better distribution channels.

If you live in Australia, I encourage you to visit one of the petition sites listed and sign this petition before the end of January. As a beer lover and homebrewer, I'd love to see more unique beers on the market here (or, alternatively, have them easier to access - it'd be great to have more micros available in pubs & clubs).