With my latest gig sending me back into the .NET world, I have been busy migrating quite a few of my tools and experience to play nice with ASP.NET sites. One of my favorite open-source tools that is gaining popularity in .NET is jQuery. For several years now, I have been using jQuery heavily to provide rich interaction on websites. When faced with the basic UpdatePanel in ASP.NET, I was presented with a challenge. I wanted a solution that would automatically call jQuery so that new content was properly parsed and updated.

In my two most recent posts, Always Learning and Coders at Work, I talked about my personal and professional need to keep learning. My most recent addition to my development arsenal has been Python. Why I considered learning the language a success, I didn't really feel that it a significant amount of new materials and features. As a result, I have chosen to dive into the functional programming language Erlang.

The book, Coders at Work was published at a very ideal time for me. I was pretty comfortable with my progress towards learning Python last year, and have been looking around for another language to start tooling around with on my computers. The book seemed like a good opportunity to get a peak into the minds of a select group of coders and see what they might have to say on the matter.

I have been using my mod_python Mako handler for several months now in my personal projects. For the most part, I have been very happy with Mako and am finding it extremely useful. One issue I have had to wrap my head around has been the inability to halt template execution cleanly. A common practice in many a website has been to flush the current output buffer, display the required authentication information with a form or a redirect, and then end the request—making authentication required on a page of content.

One of the more interesting challenges I have faced with Wordpress is offering custom pages. These could be pages such taking a survey, asking a question, or suggesting a topic. Previously, I had gone about coding these kinds of pages by just sticking the php file in the web root.