Web Development by Alistair Robinson

« Blog home

Posts Tagged ‘python’…

CSS Abstracted


May 1st, 2010 2 Comments

Half way through the development of my last site I decided to use PHP files for CSS. I had a few stylesheets, and I found I was constantly going from one to the other to copy and paste hex colour codes. And then later, if I wanted to change a colour, I’d have to change it in all those different places. That really is no way to work.
The answer to this, of course, is variables (or constants), so that you can define your colours in one place. Trouble is, CSS don’t got none. In fact, CSS is lacking in several important ways. What it boils down to is that we struggle to get around the fact that CSS doesn’t work … read on »

Mashing, Hacking and Bodging: The Django Adventure Begins


April 26th, 2010 No Comments

These have been on my to-do list for a while:
1. Write some site or application in Django
2. Begin doing test-first programming
3. Begin using Subversion
4. Learn Python
Notice the order of these items. My sensible self says I should do it the other way around. “You’re not hacking PHP now, you know. This is serious stuff. A strategic and organized approach will benefit you and others.”
I find it disturbingly easy to reject these sensible admonishments. Who wants to be sensible? So I’m taking the items in the order presented above, and I’m currently at step 1, tentatively building a real-world side-project in Django, which may come to something. In fact, I’m fairly sure we’ll use it just amongst ourselves, at least (here … read on »

Web Development and Chopping Garlic


December 2nd, 2009 1 Comment

For this post it was a toss-up between:
1. My observations on Freud’s Psychopathology of Everyday Life (boiling down to my realization that I’m a tangle of complexes, but also that I’m actually doing alright and won’t be running to an analyst any time soon)
2. A vague and geeky ramble over the broken, scarred and unstable terrain of web development.
Since moving this blog over to my website, I’m conscious I may be losing those who enjoyed such posts as Sweaty Rectangle and My 25-year-old Earworm, but the geeky ramble won out this time. Bear with me though: I am large, I contain multitudes.
Though I’ve been doing web development off and on for ten years, I’ve never been as enthusiastic about it … read on »


©2010 Alistair Robinson