Yay! First post in nearly 4 months! I feel kinda bad for leaving my April Fools Day joke on the front page for such a long time, but lucky for me my blog isn't very popular! I could have found myself in a world of hurt.

I'd like to give you all a quick update on what's been going on in my life that somewhat justifies a 4-month window of no blog posts. First of all, we had 25% of our backend development team (1 person, leaving 3 developers) get fired earlier in the year, so the workload at my day job got to be a bit heavier.

Second, my wife and I were pregnant with identical twin girls. It was a relatively high-risk pregnancy, so we spent many days in the hospital for checkups and whatnot. The doctors gave her somewhat strict bed rest orders, and I worked from home since the beginning of July (my job is awesome that way) so I could keep and eye on my wife and help with our soon-to-be two year old son.

Third, we had our identical twin girls this past Tuesday. They arrived at 9:25 and 9:27, and their names are Claire and Jane. Claire weighed 5 lb 3 oz, and Jane weighed 4 lb 14 oz. As expected, they lost a bit of weight at the beginning, but they're starting to gain weight again. My wife and the girls are all doing very well.

My son, on the other hand, is starting to realize that his world is changing quite drastically. We're trying to give him as much attention as we can, but it's definitely not the amount that he's used to. He seems to do very well with his new baby sisters, but there have already been several episodes where he just breaks down. It's sad.

I have a few days of leave and vacation that I'll be taking to help get everything settle at home. The girls are still in the "let's sleep all day and night until we're hungry" sort of phase (which is quite awesome), and my wife is up most of the night with them. That means the only person who doesn't sleep a ton during the day is my son, so we get some good father/son time.

Anyway, on to the nerdy stuff. Since I find myself with a couple hours of downtime here and there, I plan to do a bug-smashing ticket-resolving spree. Just as my blog has sat dormant for months, so have many of my side projects. Now is the time to change that!

I'd like to take this opportunity to officially announce my latest little side project: django-ittybitty! Some of you out there might not find this to be a useful application, but I hope others will enjoy it.

Many of you are familiar with the URL-shortening sites like http://tinyurl.com/, http://is.gd/, http://cli.gs/, and whole slew of others. These sites are all fine and dandy, right? Wrong! What happens when those sites have downtime and potential visitors to your site never get to your site because the URL-shortening site is down? You lose traffic. That's not good, in case you were unsure about it.

That is why I made this application. It allows you to have short URLs for any and every page on your Django site. No more need to rely on 3rd party servers to translate short URLs to real URLs on your site. So long as your pony-powered site is up and running, your visitors will be able to use URLs generated by this application to get anywhere on your site. All you need to do to make this work is download and install the application, add a middleware class to your MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES, and then use a simple template tag to generate a short URL for any given page.

django-ittybitty will keep track of the number of times a particular "itty bitty URL" has been used to access your site. I suppose some people will find that useful, but it's hardly a true metric for your "most popular" pages.

The algorithm behind this application is very simple, but it can potentially handle around 18,446,744,073,709,551,615 shortened URLs in 64 characters or fewer, neglecting the 'http://www.....' for your site (good luck getting your database to play well with that many records, much less storing them on a server :)).

For more information, please check out the project pages and enjoy:

• http://code.google.com/p/django-ittybitty/
• http://pypi.python.org/pypi/django-ittybitty

For those who are interested, here are some code samples for how to use django-ittybitty:

{% extends 'base.html' %}
{% load ittybitty_tags %}

{% block content %}
<a href="{% ittybitty_url %}">Link to this page!</a>
{% endblock %}

or:

{% extends 'base.html' %}
{% load ittybitty_tags %}

{% block content %}
{% ittybitty_url as ittybitty %}
<a href="{{ ittybitty.get_shortcut }}">Link to this page!</a>
{% endblock %}

or:

{% extends 'base.html' %}
{% load ittybitty_tags %}

{% block content %}
{% ittybitty_url as ittybitty %}
{% with ittybitty.get_shortcut as short_url %}
<a href="{{ short_url }}">Link to this page!</a>
<a href="{{ short_url }}">Link to this page again!</a>
<a href="{{ short_url }}">Link to this page one more time!</a>
{% endwith %}
{% endblock %}

Enjoy!

As some of you may have noticed, my Web host is having brain farts all over the place lately. None of my sites are very usable thanks to the poor quality of service and support on the part of my host right now. The problems seem to have begun around noon on Friday, September 19th. The symptoms include random HTTP 500 (internal server error) messages or extremely long load times.

I'm in the process of switching to a host that is more reliable. This new host is perhaps one of the best in the industry according to all of the reviews that I've read. Let's hope I have better luck there.