Nick Sergeant | Professional Drupal and Django Website Developer and Designer in Rochester, Syracuse, Buffalo, and Finger Lakes, NY
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Nov 6, 2008

Developing and deploying applications with Fabric and Subversion.

Twenty-four hours ago, I was deploying applications from development to production environments in about 5-6 steps. Today, tomorrow and every day in the future, I'm doing it in 1 step, with Fabric.

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Oct 20, 2008

Zope 3 as a web application framework: an overview

We use Zope related software throughout our day at GateHouse Media. Specifically, we run a hosted solution, Zope4Media provided by Zope Corporation. Our level of involvement with the software on the development end of things is strictly limited to template development in ZPT.

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Sep 29, 2008

A quick Stack Overflow 'friends' Greasemonkey script

So Pete and I discovered StackOverflow.com a few days ago, and we've been pretty much addicted ever since.

It's essentially a reputation-based Q&A programming community. It's massively popular, with many questions being answered in less than 60 seconds.

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Aug 18, 2008

Website usability, performance, and SEO with JavaScript navigation strategies.

There's a growing concern of mine revolving around the desire to use JavaScript in conjunction with, or in replacement of, XHTML-based navigation on websites. There are a lot of resources out there investigating the use of JavaScript with regards to search engine performance, web accessibility, and web interoperability. I'm going to try and summarize my thoughts here, and establish general guidelines to a healthy use of JavaScript with website navigations.

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Aug 7, 2008

A quick jQuery solution for stripping XHTML tags from a string, except for a specific tag.

I have a bunch of divs throughout a page, and I don't control where the content comes from. I want to be sure those divs contain no XHTML, except for <p> tags.

A simple jQuery solution should do the trick.

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Mar 18, 2008

A quick shell script for backing up databases, FTPing them to a remote server, and notifying me of any file changes.

Yeah, the title is pretty long. I really couldn't come up with anything better. Anyways, after the recent switch to Media Temple for all of my sites as a result of this debachle, I needed some peace of mind with regards to file changes and database backups for each of my sites.

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Feb 15, 2008

Yahoo! Pipes to the rescue. The JSONator: XML / RSS / ATOM to HTML with no server-side proxy.

We at GateHouse Media have lots of bloggers. We also have lots of newspapers. Naturally, we like to drive traffic in full-duplex. Unfortunately, because we have so many data 'sources' and 'destinations' always changing, it often becomes difficult for us to keep up with the massive amount of new blogs on a daily basis. We sought out to find a more dynamic process by which we can transport 'teases' of our blogs to our sites.

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