#if debug

In February, Jesper Nøhr wrote about taking an idea from conception to profitable web site in 24 hours. The project involved building an advertising product for the indie crowd, so they could advertise their products throughout other web sites in a similar fashion to how Google Adwords & Google Adsense works.

The final product named The Indiego Connection, allows advertisers to sign up and their account is manually verified to make sure that it meets their indie requirements. Once their account has been approved, they can go about configuring their advertising, which is then displayed throughout other web sites.

The really interesting thing for me about this project was the technical aspects of it, which involved:

• Django
• CherryPy
• Erlang

Jesper wrote the front end of the site using Django, as he uses it for his day job. Given the demanding time frame that the product was built in, I expect that as many of the existing applications were utilised - such as auth. The prototype for the advertising server was built using CherryPy and once Jesper was satisfied with how it was constructed, moved that into Erlang for the lightweight threading and performance.

About 24 hours after starting the project, Indiego Connection was pushed into the wild. Word got out about a free advertising product for the indie crowd quickly and within hours they had over 100 users.

In any sort of normal environment, working an idea from start to finish in 24 hours would seem nearly impossible; especially if technology is involved. Through clever use of the tools, its allowed Jesper to rapidly develop a complete product in a short space of time.

If you’re about to purchase hosting for your Django application, everything you’ll need to make a good decision is in one place at Django Friendly.

Ryan Berg is the man behind Django Friendly and put together the site as a way to consolidate the plethora of hosting options available for Django. As with some other scripting languages such as Ruby, Python also has some special hosting requirements which makes it inconvenient to host it within standard hosting configurations. The development of mod_wsgi for Apache is aiming to provide a simple, high performance option for hosting Python applications within shared hosting environments.

Allowing users the ability to filter web hosts by price and shared/dedicated hosting types is a great step forward. My suggested improvement for the site would be the ability for users to dynamically build a search query. As an example, being able to filter by server location, hosting type, price ranges, ratings and so on. Maybe an interface in a similar fashion to what is offered by a custom ticket search within the popular Trac software could be used as a starting point.

Either way, it’s another fantastic looking Django specific site which has been offered up to the greater community - you’ve got to love it.

Tonight I was presented with a Google login page which was different in a few ways:

• size and shape of the control were different
• instead of using an in page control, it took me to a completely new page
• required additional CAPTCHA validation

I suspect this may have been triggered by logging in and out of various Google products tonight, where I closed a tab but didn’t close the browser, opened new tabs and logged in and out and it might have had conflicting session information.
Does anyone know what causes this type of login prompt to be thrown up by Google?