Visual Studio Achievements
It turns out Visual Studio now has achievements. Microsoft's Channel 9 team announced this today and yeah ok it is just an extension but it just strikes me as an uncool company trying too hard to be cool.
Everyone knows the cool people code with vim or emacs on Linux. Coding in Visual Studio is about as cool as writing EJBs for in your tiny cubicle.
Django pagination solution
I, like many other people, have written all sorts of custom pagination solutions for Django. If you can't be bothered have a look at the package django-pagination.
In a minute you can have an excellent standard pagination solution that should cover 99% of developer's needs. If you would like to contribute to the project you can also find it on GitHub.
Some new features are up
Street Fighter 4 did indeed come but I did make some time to get some changes pushed. I've put in a place the functionality to grab feed data and display it on the right hand side. Rather than grabbing it each time, each entry I create I store a copy of the data in a nice converted format for a period of time so I don't get blacklisted or have to worry about sites going down.
I've also put in place code fragments displayed with pygments. I wanted to get it out the door so I let someone else do most of the leg work and I used postmarkup which is very nice. I didn't want a full bbcode implementation so I did some modification to basically make it just do code tags and perhaps next weekend I'll work on my own more specific implementation.
Lastly, the home button is gone and replaced by the ability to click the name of the site in the header as it should be. I'm slightly annoyed I forgot to put pagination in place for this page. It's not due to a lack of understand but completely forgetting to do it. I suspect it's because I haven't updated this site much and have never seen enough data on this page to care about it. That will be changing soon!
Replacing Facebook with Twitter
I've never been big on social media. I've had a twitter account for years but I use it primarily to keep up on what others are doing. I've also used Facebook and again, I've not cared too much about it. I don't use my real name and it's just something I use to post pictures of my cats and other frivolous rubbish I'm not sure I would want to tie to my real name.
But I'm finding I myself wanting to take it more serious but I don't want to give Facebook my data. So I've decided I probably will start taking Twitter seriously. I can't see myself saying much in 160 characters that I would worry about them retaining and then everything else can be put here. Thus one of the reasons I want to tidy up this place!
I also put some time into buying a short url. I was able to pick up a 4 character .co url and I managed to get something that makes sense as a short url for this site, it's a real work (and cool one, imo) and while it did take a couple hours to find it, I've quite likely improved my Scrabble skills significantly in the process.
I think the most important thing about this is that I will have fuller control over my data. I can make any or all of it disappear when I want it to. I can use it how I want to and move it where ever I want to. Of course it is easier to keep in contact with people through something like Facebook but Facebook could be described as Geocities 2.0 and as a developer I should hang my head in shame if I am using something like that. I have outgrown living on Hollywood a long time ago.
version two of this site + clint
I've slowly been patching together new features and fixing issues with this site including minor things like removing the outdated "home" link but I with nearly three weeks off I've not touched any code in that time until today and even then most of that was perl. Providing Street Fighter IV doesn't show up tomorrow I believe I will be able to push out my changes this weekend. Some of the bigger things I would like to have in place are:
- a completed image gallery
- pygments usage in the code section
- comment / message board integration
One other thing that I have been looking at (and has been putting me off from working on this) is Clint which the author describes as "a module filled with a set of awesome tools for developing commandline applications". I've been enjoying making all sorts of silly little commandline applications just to implement all sorts of nice coloured text and progress bars. There isn't anything is does that you couldn't do already. It's more of a helper and just makes it much easier to do those things. I'd thoroughly recommend checking it out.