Chicken Scratches

Facebook made a splash a year or two ago when they opened up their API. Now developers could write applications that integrate with the site. Instantly, users -- many of whom had fled to Facebook from a spam-filled MySpace -- were inundated with Requests to battle ninjas and News Items bearing obscene pictures. To Facebook's credit, they did clamp down and put some restrictions on what apps can do. A few entertaining or useful applications have risen to the top, and the potential of the API is ready to be exploited. It's not an easy task for a developer, however. In the next few Chicken Scratches posts, I'll talk about my experience developing two Facebook apps from scratch: The Limerick Book, a site that works both in and outside of Facebook and allows users to share and rate Limericks, and Play Scopa, a traditional Italian card game that users can play against each other in realtime (this one is not yet launched to the public). This first post discusses some of the difficulties I have run into. In the next couple posts, I'll discuss how I dealt with them. First, to set the scene:

My setup

I am using the Django web framework for my backend development, the latest SVN version running with Python version 2.4 on a shared host at Dreamhost. In fact, it's the same server I use for this site and weblog. To connect Django to Facebook, I am using the nice PyFacebook library, which is pretty mature, though I had to modify the code to support some of the latest features of the Facebook API. And now, on to the perils. Read the rest of this entry »

I have written two previous articles about how I edit Django template files in Emacs and XEmacs. Here is How I edit Django templates. And here is More on editing Django templates in XEmacs. Here today is another little tip that can be used in conjunction with those two other posts or independently.

Django templates involve a lot of punctuation. Between the angle brackets and slashes of HTML and the curly braces and percent signs of the Django template language, it's enough to make your pinky fingers hurt just thinking about it. Therefore any little trick to reduce some of this typing burden can be helpful. Presented here is some Emacs Lisp code to provide auto-closing of Django template tags. So even if you still have to type things like curly-brace percent-sign space ifequal blah blah2 percent-sign close-curly-brace, you won't have to type the {% endifequal %}. (Of course, if you're using the abbrev tips I gave previously, you won't even need to type the opening tag very often, but sometimes you still do.)

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