Announcing Kong: A server description and deployment testing tool. An ultra simple website monitoring tool written in Django which makes it easy to manage a list of Twill scripts for testing different sites. It was developed at the Lawrence Journal-World—Eric showed me a demo if this a year or so ago and I’ve been hoping they would open ...

Correct way to handle mobile browsers. If your site has an equivalent “mobile” version running on a different subdomain, how and when should you redirect mobile users to it and how should you let them opt in or opt out?

Large Problems in Django, Mostly Solved: Search. Eric Holscher shows how Haystack uses a number of common Django patterns (object registration, pluggable backends, QuerySet-style chaining and class-based views) to great effect in creating a powerful search application for Django. Makes me wonder if more of those patterns should be promoted to first class concepts within Django.

Debugging Django in Production Revisited. Eric Holscher expands his show-technical-errors-to-superusers middleware to only show them to users in the group named “Technical Errors”.

Django now has fast tests. Changeset 9756 switched Django’s TestCase class to running tests inside a transaction and rolling back at the end (instead of doing a full dump and reload). “Ellington’s test suite, which was taking around 1.5-2 hours to run on Postgres, has been reduced to 10 minutes.”