BigglesZX

Font availability
Text kerning
Fonts sized in sensible units (not pt)
Including extra fonts/variants for very small amounts of content
Shadows that need to be programmatic being added to non-square things
Underlines being thicker than one pixel (on things that for whatever reason can't be given borders)
Spacing of underlines (as above)
Impossible z-orders
Gradient masks on things that can't be faked with image overlays
Matching heights of dynamically sized elements

BigglesZX

import os
from PIL import Image


'''
I searched high and low for solutions to the "extract animated GIF frames in Python"
problem, and after much trial and error came up with the following solution based
on several partial examples around the web (mostly Stack Overflow).

There are two pitfalls that aren't often mentioned when dealing with animated GIFs -

BigglesZX

import Image
import ImageFont, ImageDraw
from django.conf import settings
from django.http import HttpResponse
from os.path import join

def emailshield(request):
    address = 'info@example.com'
    # change the path below to a TTF file you want to use
    font = ImageFont.truetype(join(settings.PROJECT_ROOT, 'static', 'Vera.ttf'), 14)

BigglesZX

'''
We use S3 as our media backend on Heroku, so set that up
'''
DEFAULT_FILE_STORAGE = 'storages.backends.s3boto.S3BotoStorage'
AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID = "YOUR_AWS_KEY"
AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY = "YOUR_AWS_SECRET"
AWS_STORAGE_BUCKET_NAME = "YOUR_S3_BUCKET_NAME"

'''
Adjust media URL to point directly to S3

BigglesZX

Wordpress is written with the assumption that it will be hosted using Apache. This is mostly OK except for when it comes to URL rewriting, where the assumption that .htaccess is all that’s required breaks down. In order to get permalinks working, you’ll need to add this to your nginx.conf for the site concerned:

# Rewrite rules for pretty urls
if (!-e $request_filename) {
    rewrite ^/(.+)$ /index.php?q=$1 last;
}

This catches any missing files and rewrites the request to pass the requested page as a param to index.php, which is how the permalinks are supposed to work.

The code assumes your blog is hosted at the root of your domain. If your blog resides within a subdirectory, you’ll need to use something like this instead:

BigglesZX

Dreamhost supplies a fairly old version of Python in their shared hosting environments. It recently became necessary for me to use a newer version, and since this involved a bit of juggling, and since I’m also likely to forget how I did it, I thought I’d detail the steps here. These instructions should work with any Dreamhost shared hosting user, but follow them at your own risk.

The end result of this process is being able to run a current version of Python from your shared hosting user’s shell. It requires compiling, installing and running Python from your home directory rather than the system bin directories.

1. Create a helpful working directory
I chose to install all Python-related stuff in a python/ directory under my user’s home directory.

$ mkdir ~/python
$ cd ~/python

BigglesZX

This is a useful trick if you want to wrap two sibling elements in a containing element, for example to fix stupid float bugs in IE7. I had a bit of a time figuring out how to select the right elements (wrapping is easy enough with one element, or one element's children), so I thought I'd share for the Greater Good.

From markup like this:

<div class='form-container'>
	...
	<div class='form-label'>Name (required)</div>
	<div class='form-field'><input type="text" name="you-name" value="" class="textbox" size="30" maxlength="200" /></div>

	<div class='form-label'>Email (required)</div>

BigglesZX

<?php
  //
  // some useful regular expressions and sample usage
  //

  // convert Twitter usernames into profile links
  // cred. Simon Granade (http://bit.ly/FihuS)
  $text = preg_replace('/(^|\s)@(\w+)/',
    '\1@<a href="http://twitter.com/\2">\2</a>', $text;