Empty Thoughts

I’m not really sure how I missed out on this. The Pragmatic Programmers has a new offering of Pragmatic Screencasts that cover subjects such as Core Animation, Erlang, Ruby, Active Record, and Expression Engine. At $5 per episode it’s definitely a great buy. I just got the four episodes in the Erlang by Example series and I’m making my way through them. The screencasts are professional, well done, and great resource for get up to speed on a focus subject. I’m looking forward to seeing new topics down the road. Perhaps something on Django? I highly recommend them!

We appreciate all the submissions to the Win Cool Stuff Contest. All valid submissions will be recognized on future episodes. Our winners will have the option of appearing on the show to discuss their winning submission.

In true Django fashion I created a Django application that was used to draw the winners. You can watch the screencast here:

Watch the winners drawn live

The winners are:

• The Definitive Guide to Django: Web Development Done Right – Congratulations to Francis Cleary for his submission “Multiple view prefixes”.

• Django T-Shirt – Congratulations to Paul Kenjora for his submission “Adding Custom Actions To Django Admin Change Forms”.

Special thanks go to Apress and Eminent Consulting Group for donating the prizes.

In this screencast I cover converting an existing application to the NewForms-Admin Branch of Django. We will cover hooking the NewForms-Admin into our urls.py module, extracting out the inner Admin class information into a NewForms-Admin class, handling the prepopulate_from, and organizing our admin class information into a separate module.

Downloads

Now available in an Ogg/Theora format!

MP4 Edition (33.0 MB, 21:09, H.264, MP4)

IPod Edition (16.6 MB, 21:09, H.264, MP4)

OGG Edition (34.9 MB, 21:09, Theora, OGG)

Flash Edition – All screencasts are available at ShowMeDo, although not immediately upon publish.

Source Code (44 KB)

Requires the latest version of QuickTime, VLC Media Player, or comparable software capable of playing MP4 container format and the H.264 codec.

Feeds Available

iTunes Feeds are available, So please choose the iTunes feed if you want automatic downloads in iTunes. Please show me some iTunes love.

iTunes Feeds

Django Screencasts – MP4 Edition

Django Screencasts – iPod Edition – Still waiting for it to show up

Regular RSS Feeds

Django Screencasts – MP4 Edition

Django Screencasts – iPod Edition

Show Notes

NewForms-Admin Branch Wiki Page – The NewForms-Admin documentation on the Django Wiki site.

Django Installation Documentation – Covers how to install Django. You will need to go through similar steps when installing the NewForms-Admin branch.

Using Git with Django Screencast – Excellent screencast that gives a nice introduction to working with Git and Django together.

Source code is available in the Source Code download link above. Apparently a lot of people miss that. The source for the application can be downloaded and used under the MIT License.

Django Screencasts are now available in flash format at ShowMeDo. It took me a while to get everything working on their end, but Ian and team have been wonderful and quite helpful. Speaking of ShowMeDo, they have a bunch of Python and Django videos as well as others. Great stuff. I encourage you to check it out.

In this screencast I cover how to implement application based settings in a way that keeps the application pluggable. Watch this screencast and learn more.

Downloads

Now available in an Ogg/Theora format!

MP4 Edition* (14.1 MB, 9:00, H.264, MP4)

OGG Edition (14.7 MB, 9:00, Theora, OGG)

IPod Edition* (7.2 MB, 9:00, H.264, MP4)

Source Code (40 KB)

*Requires the latest version of QuickTime, VLC Media Player, or comparable software capable of playing MP4 container format and the H.264 codec.

Feeds Available

iTunes Feeds are available, So please choose the iTunes feed if you want automatic downloads in iTunes. Please show me some iTunes love.

iTunes Feeds

Django Screencasts – MP4 Edition

Django Screencasts – iPod Edition – Still waiting for it to show up

Regular RSS Feeds

Django Screencasts – MP4 Edition

Django Screencasts – iPod Edition

Show Notes

Django Settings Documentation

Source code is available in the Source Code download link above. Apparently a lot of people miss that. The source for the application can be downloaded and used under the MIT License.

In this screencast I cover how to map specific URLs to the Flatpages contrib. There are times when you want the advantages and flexibility of flatpages, but also do not want URL mapping to be open ended and are uncomfortable with the fallback middleware approach. Watch this screencast and learn more.

Downloads

MP4 Edition (23.7 MB, 15:14, H.264, MP4)

OGG Edition (25.2 MB, 15:14, Theora, OGG)

IPod (11.9 MB, 15:14, H.264, MP4)

Requires the latest version of QuickTime, VLC Media Player, or comparable software capable of playing MP4 container format and the H.264 codec.

Feeds Available

iTunes Feeds are available, So please choose the iTunes feed if you want automatic downloads in iTunes. Please show me some iTunes love.

iTunes Feeds

Django Screencasts – MP4 Edition

Django Screencasts – iPod Edition – Still waiting for it to show up

Regular RSS Feeds

Django Screencasts – MP4 Edition

Django Screencasts – iPod Edition

Show Notes

• Django Documentation on Flatpages

In this screencast I cover NewForms Personalization. Often you have a drop down or some other field in your NewForm that you need to have personalized, or changed based on the logged in user or other instance criteria. This screencast will show you how to accomplish that in your applications.

Source code for the screencast is provided below. Please be sure to read the README file included in the download.

Downloads

Regular (20.8 MB, 13:31, H.264, MP4)

IPod (9.8 MB, 13:31, H.264, MP4)

Source Code (124 KB)

Requires the latest version of QuickTime, VLC Media Player, or comparable software capable of playing MP4 container format and the H.264 codec.

Show Notes

• Django Documentation on NewForms

• Customizing NewForms

• Marty Alchin’s Post that Discusses Keyword Arguments

I mentioned in the Django Screencast that I would be putting together a cheatsheet on Django’s custom management commands, so here it is. I hope you find it useful.

In this screencast I cover adding custom management commands into your Django applications. Custom management commands are a method of extending Django’s built-in commands that are made available through the manage.py or django-admin.py scripts.

Source code for the screencast is provided below. Please be sure to read the README file included in the download.

Downloads

Regular (64.2 MB, 41:09, H.264, MP4)

IPod (26.6MB, 41:09, H.264, MP4)

Source Code (124 KB)

Requires the latest version of QuickTime, VLC Media Player, or comparable software capable of playing MP4 container format and the H.264 codec.

Show Notes

• Custom Management Commands Cheatsheet

• Django Documentation on Custom Management Commands

• Optparse Python Library

• Registering Custom Commands with Manage.py

• NewForms Generator

P.S. I apologize for the delay in getting this screencast put together. Between Leopard upgrades and health issues time got away from me.

Update

My server was getting hammered with downloads and was unavailable for a while this morning. I’ve moved the downloads to S3 to try to offload some of the impact. Hopefully this will correct the issue. If you experience problems downloading the screencast, please email me.

In this screencast I cover implementing model based feeds using the syndication framework.

We’ll start where we left off last time and enhance our simple blogging application by adding feeds for individual sections of the website. We will walk through modifications to the urls.py, implementation of a model based Feed class, and changes to our base template to expose the feeds. Finally I will briefly cover how you can use Atom feeds in place of RSS.

Source code for the example application is provided below. Please be sure to read the README for information about requirements.

Downloads

Regular (51.6 MB, 33:06, H.264, MP4)

IPod (28.6MB, 33:06, H.264, MP4)

Source Code (124 KB)

Requires the latest version of QuickTime, VLC Media Player, or comparable software capable of playing MP4 container format and the H.264 codec.

In this screencast I cover implementing Django’s syndication framework into an existing application. We’ll start with a simple blogging application and walk through what it takes to get syndication (rss feeds) implemented, covering modifications to the urls.py, implementation of a Feed class, creation of the templates, as well as adding syndication auto-detection in the browser.

Source code for the example application is provided below. Please be sure to read the README for information about requirements.

Downloads

Full Quality (135.8 MB, 15:11, Apple Animation)

Medium Quality (19.7 MB, 15:11, H.264)

IPod & Apple TV (24.4MB, 15:11, Apple Animation)

Source Code (112 KB)

Requires QuickTime

Note, I apologize for the large file sizes. I’m working on getting the compression settings correct, while still preserving the quality of the screencast. I didn’t want to hold off posting this any longer. The next one should be much improved.

I appreciate any and all feedback, both positive and negative.

Special Thanks

Special thanks to Ryan Bates of Railscasts for giving me some pointers and help along the way. If you do Rails development you definitely need to check out Ryan’s work as well as support what he’s doing.