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.

After spending a good portion of the day with Chris and Xander out in the Chicago heat, I let them know that Dad would be taking care of dinner tonight. I remembered that we had a pork tenderloin roast in the freezer, so I got an idea. Little did I know just how good it would turn out!

I have a friend that wants to update a banner on his Wordpress blog homepage without changing the template files. I tell him I'd be glad to help him out and start working on a plugin that provides a custom administration page to allow for this. As I am a firm believer in the power of a lazy coder to get things done faster and better, my first thought was: "Why don't I just see if I can hijack the 'Select Image From Gallery' page to do this?"