Site Performance: CDN vs Local Hosting

In a few posts here, we will explore how to improve the site performance and scale. To begin with one of the easiest performance boost to page loads is to source your standard libraries from CDN whenever possible instead of sourcing them from your server. WHAT A CDN, Content Delivery Network, is a set of servers spread across the globe that host content and have an optimized...

Some Useful Web Development Tools

In course of working and learning, we all discover some useful tools that just make life easier. But the net is a big place. And usual venues of information sharing - meeting at conferences and swapping tidbits doesn't happen all the time. So am trying to write down a list of webdev tools, and other general tools that I found useful. There is a lot of choice out there for most tools. So I have...

Writing Custom Template Tags in Django

Django templates are the view part of the Django MVC. So, the templates should just handle the display part and any login in templates should be kept to a minimum. However, there are times when we just have to include logic in the templates, and using template tags is the most elegant way to handle this. Creating your own custom template tags is fairly simple. One template tag needed often is...

Testing PayPal on Website

PayPal provides a testing tool called PayPal Sandbox to test website's PayPal's deployment. We can create pseudo buyer and seller accounts, provide the accounts with pseudo money and cards, and test the transaction and user experience. All this without putting up real money or fees. They have a User's Guide here. However, the basic steps are simple: Create a Sandbox account first...

Paypal Shopping Cart

PayPal's documentation has really very subtle hints about what needs to be done to get Paypal working for a website, and you need to plough through a lot of links to figure out anything useful. On sign up, they take the user to a page with customizable buttons for Buy Now, Subscribe, Shopping Cart. Now, if the site has only one item to sell, it should use the 'Buy Now', if it is selling subscriptions,...

Adding placeholders, autofocus and other attributes to Django forms

Placeholder is a short hint (a word or short phrase) intended to aid the user with data entry in forms. With HTML5, adding placeholders to forms is as simple as including a keyword: <label>Name: <input name="name" placeholder="John Doe" type="text" /></label> This would appear in the form as:   Name: To add placeholders to Django forms, simply specify...

Changing Django Password

Go to the directory where your settings.py resides: $ python manage.py shell >>from django.contrib.auth.models import User >> users = User.objects.all() >> users (output) [<User: foo>, <User: adminlogin>, <User: bar>] >> user = User.objects.filter(name='adminlogin') >> user.set_password('newpassword') >> user.save() This can be used to...