Friday, December 18, 2009

Asynchronous Email Gotchas in App Engine



Summary: It's easy to send email asynchronously using App Engine and Django, but beware path differences between development and production environments.

Sending email is a standard part of running a website.  For instance, we might email the admins when a new user registers, or email a user when they've requested a password reset.  These emails are triggered while handling an HTTP request.  Therefore, if something goes wrong, it could interfere with the user's session by returning a 500 error or by slowing down the response.

Tuesday, December 8, 2009

Does it matter that you can identify a Google App Engine app?

http://blog.stringbuffer.com/2009/05/how-to-identify-if-website-is-hosted.html

StringBuffer describes a few ways to possibly identify a Google App Engine app:

What I want to know is, does it matter? Is it harmful that an App Engine app can be outed? Useful? Hidden option c?

Friday, December 4, 2009

jQuery Autogrow and IE

One cool HTML widget that's been getting popular these days is the auto-growing text area. It expands as you type (you've probably used this widget in Facebook comments). Turns out there's a nice jQuery plugin that provides this functionality: jQuery autogrow plugin. I recommend it!

Sadly, this plugin has an IE-specific bug (weird, I know). IE complains of an illegal argument (versions: IE8, jQuery 1.3.2, and autogrow plugin 1.2.2)