By : Shabda Raaj

Keeping url structure sane plays a major role in user experience, by making it easy to go to specific pages and navigate the site. Some real world urls and how they could have been better follow.

The Bad Urls:

• http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1967820
• http://area51.phpbb.com/phpBB/viewforum.php?f=99
• http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/aa336522.aspx

The Good

• Easy to develop for. The id referred is the Primary key

The Bad

• Hard for users to select the correct page from a url bar dropdown
• Bad for SEO

Neutral:

• Easy to guess next and previous ...

By : Shabda Raaj

TL;DR version: Here is an app to allow logging in via twitter, facebook, openid, yahoo, google, which should work transparently with Django authentication system. (@login_required, User and other infrastructure work as expected.) Demo and Code.Longer version follow:

We are releasing our new app. Django-Socialauth. This app makes it awfully easy, to allow users to login your site using Yahoo/Google/Twitter/Facebook/Openid. A demo is available here.

This is released under an Attribution Assurance License. A copy of the same is provided included with the code.

After installing this app, you can use @login_required on any view ...

By : lakshman

Twitter's robust REST API enables building of good applications that leverage its increasingly large and real-time data.

Google's cloud system App Engine not only provides a scalable platform for deploying applications, but also proves to be economically viable because of its pay per resource usage model and a large free quota.

Little wonder then, there are increasingly large number of twitter apps being deployed on App Engine.

In this post, I am going to examine how to create a simple application based on twitter's REST API and deploy it on Google App Engine. A deployed version can ...

By : Shabda Raaj

A common goal in web application development is creating subscription based application, where users can use their domains.

For example,
1. Basecamp allows you to manage your project, and gives users as subdomain like xyz.grouphub.com 2. Blogger goes a step further, and allows you to use arbitrary domains with your domain, using Cnames.

django-subdomains is an application which makes both these possible, and allows you to charge the users using paypal.

More details are available here, but to whet your appetite, some details

1. You want to allow users to create accounts.
2. Users should get a subdomain for their ...

By : Shabda Raaj

What is EC2

Unless you have been living on Mars these last few years, you are sure to have heard of EC2. Amazon's cloud offering, it offers infinite scalability. Using EC2, you can bring up any number of machines online at minutes notice, and after you are done with them, bring them down.

How does EC2 work?

A EC2 machine is nothing but a bare machine. An Amazon Machine Image (AMI) is a machine bundled as an Image, with preconfigured software which you can start at moments notice. We will take a AMI with a basic Ubuntu installed, and ...

By : lakshman

Twitter, just like many other Web2.0 sites, has an excellent API. So much so, writing a twitter app is considered to be "Hello World" of Web2.0 Programming.

I wrote an application recently. It is DM++. By default, this application allows you to receive direct messages from twitter users you have @replied even if you currently don't follow them. You can even configure application to be able to receive direct messages from people you have @replied in only last 2 days, or receive Dm from all other twitter users.

Look how many people are currently complaining Cant DM ...