It’s been a while since my last post. Since then I have been learning Python and Django. I definitely prefer Python to PHP. What I love about Python (and using Django) is that it allows a novice like myself to make relatively complex applications without frying my brain. One of my first projects with Django was [...]
It has been an observation of mine that some of the best online communities are the ones that most effectively mimic offline communities. Take Facebook for example. In my opinion, Facebook owes much of its success to its members’ use of real names. My news feed doesn’t say “OgReSLAYER91 is friends with Xx1337haXzorxX.” Instead, it [...]
Daehee Park recently wrote about scaping Penn State’s Schedule of Courses to create a free API of course data. His method of choice was to use Beautiful Soup for Python. As I have yet to learn Python, I will be taking a different approach towards the same end: Dapper. Dapper bills itself as a tool [...]
One of the main problems with using a relational database such as MySQL is that it can be tricky to store and retrieve hierarchical information. Hierarchies are expressed with tree structures whereas relational databases use flat tables. So how can one fit this square peg into a round hole? Fortunately, there are several methods out [...]