I Kept Missing Meetings, So I Built an Alarm Google Calendar Can’t Whisper Through

Calendar Alarm is a free, open-source Chrome extension that turns Google Calendar reminders into a full-screen alarm, without asking for access to your Google account.

Tools Projects JavaScript

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Get Your Feet Wet with AI for Free: Build and Publish a Website Without Spending a Dime

A step-by-step guide to trying an AI agent for free. Set up Hermes Agent with a free Nous Portal account, have it build an 11ty blog for an aspiring ghostwriter, push it to GitHub, and publish it on Netlify.

AI Tutorials

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I Built My Own Evernote Replacement. Seven Months Later, I Love It.

I built DocManFu to cancel Evernote. Now I scan a document, let OCR and AI sort it out, and use the bills page to keep track of what I owe.

Tools Projects

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Muse Spark 1.3 Built Me Asteroids in 26 Seconds

I gave the Muse Spark 1.3 model from Zen (Free) my standard model test — build a single-page Asteroids game — and it shipped a working, sound-effects-and-all game in 26.3 seconds.

AI Tools

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I Stopped Writing My Daily Standup from Memory

How I use Hermes, Obsidian, and Claude Code session history to draft a better daily standup from the work trail I already leave behind.

automation productivity ai

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Meet Lewis and Lenny — My AI Coworkers

People say Claude does everything OpenClaw does. I disagree. Here's how my OpenClaw agents became the most reliable coworkers I've ever had.

AI Tools

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How I Built an Autonomous QA Pipeline with AI Agents on a Mac Mini

I set up AI agents to find bugs, fix them, and deploy to production — all running autonomously on a Mac Mini at home. Here's how the pipeline works.

AI Development DevOps

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My Playbook for Building an App with AI

A step-by-step checklist I follow when building a new app with AI — from design mockups to deployment to getting found on Google.

AI Development

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One Week with OpenClaw — A Claude Code User's Perspective

I was skeptical about OpenClaw. As a heavy Claude Code user, why add a middle-man? After one week, I get it now.

AI Tools

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Laziness Is My Superpower!

Why the right kind of laziness makes you a better developer. Strategic laziness isn't about avoiding work—it's about finding the path of least resistance to get results.

productivity

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Introducing WebhookSpy: A Free Webhook Testing Tool Built with AI

How I built WebhookSpy, a free webhook testing tool, in just a few hours using OpenAI Codex and Claude. From frustration with existing tools to a fully deployed solution.

AI Projects SaaS

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Upscaling Images with AI Tools

How I used AI tools to upscale and enhance a historical image for printing an 8x10 photo for Thanksgiving decor.

AI Images

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Use AI to Write Your Git Commit Messages

Discover how to leverage AI to generate informative git commit messages automatically. Learn to implement a bash script that uses OpenAI's GPT-4 to create consistent, detailed commit messages, saving time and improving your project's documentation.

Git AI DevOps Productivity Automation OpenAI Bash

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My Software Easter Eggs

A developer's tale of implementing humorous easter eggs in a professional video clipping tool, featuring Konami code and a snarky Clippy revival.

humor JavaScript yada

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From Gatsby to 11ty

A brief overview of moving my blog from Gatsby to 11ty, highlighting the simplicity and speed of 11ty compared to Gatsby.

11ty Gatsby JavaScript

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UtahJS Conference 2024 Review

Explore key insights from UtahJS Conference 2024, including React Server Components, vanilla JS web components, DevOps with GitHub Actions, AI-powered features, and real-time hypermedia. Discover cutting-edge tools and techniques shared by industry experts to enhance your JavaScript development skills.

JavaScript TypeScript

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Resizing Classic Art for the Samsung Frame TV Without the Mat

A guide to using a custom script to resize and crop images for perfect display on a Samsung Frame TV.

automation bash cli

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Markdown to PDF Magic: Create a One-Command Converter for macOS

Learn how to streamline your documentation workflow by building a custom script that transforms Markdown files into professionally formatted PDFs with a single command. This step-by-step guide covers everything from installing prerequisites to creating and using your own mdtopdf tool on macOS.

automation MacOS cli bash PDF

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Automate sending images via text with Mac OS Messages

How I sent out images to 80 phone numbers in 12 minutes with Mac OS Messages

automation MacOS cli bash

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156 Books in 156 Weeks

Highlights of some of my favorite books that I read in 2023

books

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Get Latest Python Package Version

Discover how to quickly determine the latest version of any Python package using the pip command. Use my script to quickly get the text you need to paste into your requirements file.

Python cli bash

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Adding Note Margins to a PDF File

Learn how to effortlessly add note margins to PDF files for an enhanced note-taking experience on apps like Notability and GoodNotes.

PDF Python

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UtahJS 2023 Conference Review

A review of the 2023 UtahJS conference - summaries of the talks attended including caching strategies, codemods, SvelteKit, debugging, the importance of side projects, and key takeaways.

JavaScript TypeScript

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Building a Backyard Shed

I bought a Sturdy-Built shed kit. Below are photos of the build process.

DIY

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AutoSavvy / AutoSource - Save Yourself the Stress and Money

I've purchased 3 cars from AutoSource / AutoSavvy and it has been the most frustrating and most expensive car buying experience ever. Save yourself!

Rants

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52 Books in 52 Weeks

What I learned from reading/listening to 1 book per week.

audiobooks goals

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Docker-Compose Overwriting Dockerfile Data

How to keep docker-compose volumes from overwriting container data.

Docker

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Create Your Own Dynamic DNS Service

Don't pay for an expensive service when you can code it yourself in two lines.

DNS automation

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Batching to Reduce Downtime

Adjusting the flow of your process can make good routines better.

automation

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Updating LetsEncrypt SSL Cert Remotely

When you can't get things to run properly on your server, do it on your dev machine!

Docker Nginx hosting

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PNG to ICNS Conversion Script and MacOS Automation

There are no special tools required to convert a PNG file to and ICNS file. Just use this simple script.

MacOS Images Automation

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POC Use KeyCloak JWT to Authorize Hasura Queries

Proof-of-concept to use a JWT generated by KeyCloak to authorize queries in Hasura.

SideHustle KeyCloak Hasura

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POC Authenticate with KeyCloak and Get JWT

First proof-of-concept - register and authenticate user and get valid token.

SideHustle KeyCloak

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User Authentication

What led to our decision to use KeyCloak over other available options

SideHustle KeyCloak

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Starting a New Side Hustle Startup

Follow me on a journey to create a new side hustle startup with some friends.

SideHustle

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Missouri/Nauvoo Church History Tour

We took our 18 year old daughter on a tour of church history sites. This is my travel log.

travel

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Stop Being Late for Virtual Meetings

Tampermonkey script that completely interrupts your workflow to remind you of meetings.

JavaScript Tampermonkey

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Scripting MacOS Configuration

Tips for scripting your mac setup.

MacOS cli bash

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More Robust Virtual Note Taking

Using Notability or Goodnotes to enhance your study and note-taking on a digital device.

iOS tips

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Disney World 2021

My experience and recommendations for the Happiest Place on Earth

Disney Family Vacation

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Starting Front-End and Back-End Scripts at the Same Time

When you need to start a backend and transpile your front-end code for development purposes, here is a handy script to do both at the same time.

Django Python bash JavaScript Aurelia

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How to Convert an eBook to an Audiobook

Use text-to-speech and FFmpeg to generate an audiobook from an eBook on MacOS.

audiobooks Python MacOS automation

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Goodbye LastPass, Hello Bitwarden

LastPass is a great tool, but I've found a solution I like more.

Synology

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JAMstacks - Gatsby & 11ty

After spending a month migrating two WordPress sites to Gatsby and 11ty, here are a few of my thoughts.

JavaScript Django Gatsby 11ty

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Wildcard Let's Encrypt SSL Cert on Synology NAS

How to set up a wildcard cert and auto-renew on Synology NAS

Synology

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How to Create a Debt Snowball Spreadsheet

Watch my 16 minute tutorial on how to create a "living" debt snowball tracker

finance

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Goodbye WordPress

I've moved my blog from WordPress to Gatsby. Here's the WHY and HOW.

MacOS Gatsby

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Google Meet - On Air Light Automation

Learn how to automate your desk lamp to turn on during virtual meetings, enhancing your work-from-home setup and improving communication with family members. This step-by-step guide covers the process and benefits of creating an 'On Air' light for Google Meet and other video conferencing platforms

automation bash work from home

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Rebecca Roll'd

You've been Rick Roll'd, but have you been Rebecca Roll'd?

humor Dustin

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Tools We Use to Keep Our Kids Safe with Technology

We utilize every tool we can think of to keep our kids safe - both physically and mentally - when it comes to using cell phones, internet, television, and other technology.

Family

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Running Portainer on Synology

Portainer offers more features and control over docker containers. Here are two simple steps to get it up and running on your Synology NAS

Synology Docker

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Audible to Plex

How and why I migrated all my Audible audiobooks to my Plex server and how I consume them.

Plex audiobooks

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Keep Webmin Running

A simple bash script to check if services are running and start them if not.

Apache bash cron MySQL Virtualmin Webmin

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Convert Audio Clip to Ringtone - Mac Automation

How turn MP3 files into ringtones with a simple right-click command on MacOS

audio

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Weight Loss Advice from a Dietician/Nutritionist

Some notes and learnings from visiting with a nutritionist

health

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Building Your Own Website on a Budget in 2017

The tools I would use to build a personal website in 2017

WordPress

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Real-World Examples of Aurelia's Compose Tag

Let me show you a few examples of how we use the <compose> tag

Aurelia

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Aurelia - Sharing Data Between Components

Using dependency injection to share data between components.

Aurelia JavaScript

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Observing Arrays in Aurelia

If you're struggling to observe array data changes in Aurelia, check out these code snippets.

Aurelia

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Aurelia Replaceable Parts & HTML Only Templates

When you need dynamic content in a slot, you really need a replaceable part.

Aurelia

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Internet Pause Button with DD-WRT

How to set up DD-WRT on a Nighthawk router to allow you to pause your home wifi from your phone.

Family

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Daily Passwords for Kids' Computer

How I change the logins everyday on the computer to make sure they get their jobs done before zoning out on the computer.

Family MacOS Python

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Aurelia Accordion Component From Scratch

How to build a simple accordion component in Aurelia

Aurelia JavaScript

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Why Aurelia over Angular, React, Ember or Meteor

After looking at the path of migrating from AngularJS to Angular 2, I'm changing lanes.

Aurelia JavaScript

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Right Click Folder & Create ISO in OSX

How to set up a right-click menu option to create an ISO file from a folder.

automation MacOS

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Using Gmail for Support

How and why I prefer to simply use Gmail for customer support.

Gmail support

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Top 8 ng-shirts

My favorite shirts from ng-conf (AngularJS) ranked.

AngularJS

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ng-conf Advanced Workshop Review

Summary of my experience with ng-conf workshops

AngularJS

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How to Create Lego Logo Inspired Text in Illustrator

Quick and simple tutorial for creating Lego type fonts.

tutorials

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Setting up a Signed SSL Certificate on Nginx

How to add an SSL to a website running on nginx

Nginx

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Essentialism Book Review

My review of the highly-touted book, Essentialism

books

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2014 Year In Review

A look back at all things 2014, and goals for 2015

Dustin Family

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Quick Recurring Payments with Stripe & Checkout

How to quickly set up a recurring payment page with PHP and Stripe

PHP

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Setting up OpenSprinkler

How I set up OpenSprinkler

automation

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Productivity Tools & Processes

Some new productivity ideas and tools I want to try

productivity

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Django Pluralize Outside of Templates

How to use the pluralize filter directly in python

Python Django

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Sync Personal Docs on Kindle for Mac

How to get your personal documents into Kindle

tips

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MemcachedKeyLengthError: Key length is > 250

Fixing a recurring problem with Django's built-in cache page decorator

Python Django

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Refactoring to Save 4805 Lines of Code

Using Python magic to save a lot of lines of code.

Python Django

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Python Twisted IRC Bot: Lazy Coder

IRC Bot that responds to the word "why" with lazy coder responses

Python

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SSH Tunnel in pgAdmin3 for PostgreSQL

How to create an SSH tunnel to pgAdmin for PostgreSQL for a graphical experience on a remote server

PostgreSQL

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Django MONTH_CHOICES

Short tip on getting month choices from django.contrib

Django

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Setting up a Django Server with PostgreSQL, Nginx, Celery & RabbitMQ

Step-by-step guide to setting up a Django server with all the works.

Django Nginx PostgreSQL

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Python, Django & the Google Adsense API

How to talk to the Google Adsense API with Django/Python

Django Python

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Django Textile/Markdown Template Caching Speedup

Speeding up a Django site by transforming text during database saves.

Django

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Setting Up Your Own Sentry Server

Short tutorial on how to set up your own self-hosted Sentry server.

Django

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DigitalOcean, Heroku, Linode & Webfaction: Hosting Showdown

I tried out four different web hosts to determine where I want to host my next site.

hosting

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The Tools I Use

Some of my favorite apps and websites

Dustin

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Django Custom Upload Handler to Compress Image Files

How to compress images when they are saved in a Django application.

Django

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What Every High School Student Should Know About Computing

What I would teach beginning computer students

opinions

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How I Cured My RSI & Back Pain

I considered changing careers because of years of wrist pain. Now I'm pain-free after learning about the mindbody connection.

mindbody

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Replacing Myself

My plan to hire someone to help with my business

freelance

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Phurlite: Simple PHP SQLite URL Shortener

A simple URL shortener contained in one PHP file and .htaccess file for Apache with support for Tweetbot

PHP

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How to Reset a Django Admin Password

The most efficient way to change your admin password on a Django site.

Django

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Herniated L5-S1 Disc

How I herniated a disc in my back and what I am doing to cope and recover.

health

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Setting Up a ZNC IRC Bouncer

How to stay logged in to IRC and connect on different machines

bash

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Audio Books!

Let me share my love of audiobooks!

audiobooks

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My Django Dev Environment: Virtualenv, pip, git, & PyCharm

How I use virtualenv and pip to manager my python dependencies per project

Django

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How Sports Improves Programmer Focus

I played a lot of sports as a teenager and it has helped me focus as a programmer.

opinions

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Django Color Theme for PyCharm

Django green theme for PyCharm

Django

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Python IRC Bot Using Twisted (Rollbot)

A simple IRC bot that will show the page titles of links posted

Python

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Top 10 Productivity Tips

Everyone has their productivity hacks. Let me share mine with you.

humor

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The Problem with Buying Templates

Scan your html carefully when you buy a template.

HTML

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Django smart_unicode

Use Django's `smart_unicode` function to solve unicode errors

Django

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jQuery UI Dialog: OK click on Enter key

Simple jQuery snippet to close a dialog box on enter

JavaScript

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SVN to Git

How to migrate a subversion repo to Git

git

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Budgeting a Trip to Disneyland

How to plan a trip to Disneyland on a budget (circa 2011)

Family finance

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PHP, Python & Django

Why I'm moving from PHP to Django (instead of Ruby on Rails)

PHP Python Django

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77 Things I Did in 2010

2010 was a busy and memorable year for me.

Dustin

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Implementing a Forgot Password Feature on a Django Site

Everyone forgets their password, help customers get it back.

Django

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Mobile App on Subdomain with Django

Using an alternate settings file for a mobile version of my site.

Django

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Django: ProgrammingError: Can't Adapt

An error I got often while learning Python and the simple fix.

Django

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Copy Model Object in Django

How to copy a database record in Django

Django

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Why The Cash Envelope System Didn't Work for Us

The cash envelope system is not for everyone

Family finance

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Django cron on Webfaction

How to adjust the python path to run Django scripts in cron

Django

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Use Google Earth to Track Your Mileage

How to use Google Earth to track distance

tips

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Django: Filter Model on Date Range

A generic filter function to filter query results by data ranges

Django

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Django & Djson… er, JSON

Converting a DB object to JSON format

Django

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Webfaction Review

Why I love Webfaction so much as a Django developer

Django

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Simple PHP Pluralize

A simple function for pluralizing strings in PHP

PHP

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Django: Login Form on Every Page

How to include a login form on every page of a Django app

Django Python

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Django: Filtering a ModelForm field

How to filter a ModelForm by foreign key in Django

Django

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Download POP3/IMAP Email Attachments with PHP

How to download email attachments via PHP

PHP

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Webfaction Limited Review

A quick review of Webfaction hosting

hosting

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Django Tip: get_FIELD_display()

Magic template functions in Django

Django

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Dynamic Filtered Drop-Down Choice Fields With Django

How to filter the options of a <select> component based on the selection of another <select> component.

Django ajax

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Django Accounts on Subdomains

How to create a Django app where each user account gets their own subdomain

Django

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Django Model Style Guide

The preferred order of Model classes and methods

Django

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Remember TRBL

The TROUBLE remembering the order of things in CSS

CSS

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Update Windows Path Without Rebooting

Updating the PATH environment variable without rebooting in Windows

Windows

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Rails Creator Praises PHP

Ruby on Rails creator, DHH gives a little praise to PHP

PHP

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Restoring MySQL InnoDB Files on Windows

How I escaped disaster by restoring a MySQL database

MySQL

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Paint.net Trim Function

How to trim an image like you would in Photoshop

images

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The Naartjie

What is a naartjie and where did it come from?

yada

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Fun With Hot Linking

How to swap out images if other sites are using them on their site.

Apache

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Gmail Addresses Ignore Dots

Gmail ignores periods in your email address. This can be good and bad.

Gmail

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Bedbugs & Beetles, or Skeeters?...

Old song from 2nd grade that sits in my head...

humor

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HTML Files Parsed Through PHP

How to pass .html files through the PHP parser with Apache

PHP Apache

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Thank You Andy!

The miracle product that removed the ballpoint pen ink from our new sofa

Family

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PHP Templating

Templating can be very simple with PHP, no other frameworks needed for basic templates.

PHP

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Welcome me!

My first blog post ever. Jan 18, 2005

Dustin

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