Digital Solutions & Online Creative 

Alex runs a small digital creative business from an office in London. It's called Outside In Media.

About

Soyrex is a web development and design resource intended as a place for me to share tips and tricks relating to html, css, web design, web development and other internet and web topics. If you like what you read, leave a comment, or send an email. Also, check out my portfolio.

This form does not yet contain any fields.
    Search the Archives
    Currently Reading..
    • Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking
      Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking
      by Malcolm Gladwell

      Blink talks about flash cognition and sub-conscious cognitive activity.. awesome read!

    • Confessions of an Economic Hit Man: The Shocking Story of How America Really Took Over the World
      Confessions of an Economic Hit Man: The Shocking Story of How America Really Took Over the World
      by John Perkins

      Confessions of an Economic Hit Man - i knew the world was a big conspiracy.. but this is a gripping insight into how the world really works.

    Recommended Reading
    • Designing with Web Standards (Voices That Matter)
      Designing with Web Standards (Voices That Matter)
      by Jeffrey Zeldman, Ethan Marcotte
    • Web Standards Creativity: Innovations in Web Design with XHTML, CSS, & DOM Scripting: Innovations in Web Design with XHTML, CSS, and DOM Scripting
      Web Standards Creativity: Innovations in Web Design with XHTML, CSS, & DOM Scripting: Innovations in Web Design with XHTML, CSS, and DOM Scripting
      by C et al Adams
    • CSS Mastery: Advanced Web Standards Solutions
      CSS Mastery: Advanced Web Standards Solutions
      by Andy Budd, Cameron Moll, Simon Collison
    Recent Comments
    Friday
    22Jan2010

    Tutorial: using @font-face to embed fonts

    So @font-face has been around for a while now, and everyone has been ranting and raving about how it will change the web. Services like typekit have arrived to try and tackle the issue of licensing and distribution. However the technology is here. It's cross browser, and it works today. So, this is a quick tutorial in how to easily and quickly ACTUALLY use font-face to embed a font on your site.

    Click to read more ...

    Thursday
    21Jan2010

    Quick Tip: Grounding web designs in Google Chrome

    As Google Chrome's market share grows it has become necessary (in my pedant's eyes) to acknowledge that some people will be viewing your site without a status bar and subsequently with no grounding or footer space. In order to combat the unsightly finish this gives to a site, I have decided to include a border-bottom: 3px solid #ccc; in the body style for the new Outside In Media site - http://outsideinmedia.co.uk

    A minor issue, but also easily fixed.. so check it out.. and maybe you might want to use it in the future.

    Wednesday
    20Jan2010

    A New Year for Monitter

    The new year is well and truly underway. I've been back in London now for a few weeks, plugging away. A few exciting things are on the horizon. This is a quick post to let everyone know what's going on this year.. starting with some exciting developments on the Monitter.com front.

    Click to read more ...

    Tuesday
    06Oct2009

    What's missing from Desktop Twitter Clients?

    Well, this week atebits announced that they were releasing tweetie2. Now, being a sad geek, i use twitter quite a lot. Admittedly, until recently this was more to do with monitter.com than with anything else, but twitter is slowly becoming a social destination for me as well.

    However, in the same vein as why i originally built monitter.com - I see twitter search as a still under utilised potential for networking. What i'd like to see is a twitter application that allows me to merge my saved searches and my follows into one timeline. I use my desktop tweetie like a news radar, it's how i know what's going on.. but what i'd like is to be able to queue up a bunch of saved searches as well, and have them injected into my main timeline - simple really.

    Wednesday
    16Sep2009

    Auto Scaffold Django Admin Registration

    Since the admin structure in Django changed (1.0?) I've found myself constantly feeling cheated that i have to actually create classes to get my admin system working - granted you usually want to create custom admin features for a model, but when you're just starting out with a project, the last thing you want to be doing is building generic admin classes and registering them with the admin app.

    So, to combat this annoyance, i wrote a simple python script that i keep on my path on my mac, it just generates a scaffold of the admin classes i need for a project. Pretty simple.

    #!/usr/bin/python

    import sys
    import re
    if len(sys.argv) != 2:
            print "Usage: adminscaffold <input-file>"
            sys.exit()

    arg = sys.argv[1]
    inf = "%s/models.py" % arg

    f = open(inf)
    classes = []
    registers = []
    for line in f.readlines():
            if re.match('class .*?\(models.Model\):',line):
                    (c,j) = line.split('(',2)
                    (j,cname) = c.split(' ',2)

                    classes.append("""
    class %sAdmin(admin.ModelAdmin):
            pass
    """ % (cname))
                    registers.append("""admin.site.register(%s, %sAdmin)
    """ % (cname,cname))

    print """from django.contrib import admin
    from %s.models import *
    """ % (arg)
    print "".join(classes)
    print "".join(registers)

    It's ugly and hacky, but it does do the job. Try it out.. basic usage is just:

    $ django-admin-scaffold.py <app-name>

    You run this in the same directory as your manage.py script.. and just provide the name of the app. It spits the code out on STDOUT, so you'll need to pipe it into a file to use it.