Now that I have my contacts and calendar syncing to the cloud, the next step is a Todo list.  And I’ve finally settled on a todo list solution that works for me, my mac, and my mobile life style:  Google Tasks plus Fluid (PC users can use Google Chrome).  Google tasks is lightweight, simple, and mobile accessible.  Fluid creates stand-alone desktop apps from web site applications.

Here’s how some configurations will look when you’re done:

Gmail Google Tasks

iPhone Google Tasks

What you’ll need

• A Gmail account
• Fluid

How to make it work

You can create a fluid app using the following URL to mimic Google Tasks as it appears in Gmail:

http://mail.google.com/tasks/ig?up_ShowTips=false&lang=en&country=us&.lang=en&.country=us&synd=ig&libs=I6gXJQFzsCg/lib/libcore.js,MJLTofH-Kpk/lib/libsetprefs.js&extern_js=/extern_js/f/CgJlbhICdXMrMAo4ACwrMBI4ACwrMBM4ACw/UpcjQ5pVgbs.js&view=home

Or you can create a fluid app using the following URL to mimic Google Tasks for mobile devices:

http://www.google.com/m#tasks

http://mail.google.com/tasks/iphone

If you choose the later, you’ll need to set your User Agent to that of an iPhone, Gphone or other mobile device.  Here’s the latest iPhone User Agent string:

Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 2_2_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/525.18.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.1.1 Mobile/5H11 Safari/525.20

What you might want

Once you’ve got a Google Tasks fluid app, you should consider the following fluid preferences:

• Application icon: Google Tasks Fluid
• Window Style: Chromeless (None)
• Window Opacity: ~90%
• Windows are draggable from anywhere: checked
• Hide Status Bar (not a preference. see View menu)
• Hide Tool Bar (also in the View menu)

Now all I gotta do is watch Slumdog millionaire and I’ll be on my way.

<xml>Hello</xml>

Then switch over to HTML mode and wrap that code in a pre tag like this:

<pre lang="xml" escaped="true">
    <xml>Hello</xml>
</pre>

But there’s a small catch

If you switch back and forth between HTML and Visual mode, you’ll lose that ‘escaped=”true”‘ attribute (probably a bug). Then you’ll end up with double escaped code on you page like this:

<xml>Hello</xml>

Solution?

• Only work in HTML mode, so your code doesn’t get escaped in the first place (Then you won’t need the escaped=”true” attribute either. I think you can even disable Visual mode).
• Write you post in Visual mode, then switch HTML mode, add your pre tags with escaped=”true” attribute, and then don’t switch back to Visual mode (that’s how I wrote this post).

I don’t like either solution, but I prefer the second.

Recently, I had to make some changes to some XML that had been written in a Django template.  To avoid the xml being rendered by the browser as HTML, the code had been manually escaped, thus making the code rather unreadable.

Sorry, no views

The various documentation templates were being rendered using direct_to_template so I couldn’t move the XML to a view and let Django’s autoescaping take over.  Besides, the XML is legitamately part of the static content of the page and shouldn’t be in the view.

Custom filters can be very misleading

So I decided to write a custom filter to escape the XML as needed.  But I kept running into this error:

‘my_filter’ is not a valid tag library: Could not load template library from django.templatetags.doc_code, No module named my_filter

Which made me think I had a path issue, or a misplaced file, or a missing __init__.py.  But all my initial guesses checked out.  Turns out that django spits out a ‘No module’ error when there are errors in the filter code.  Very misleading.

Now it’s looking good

So the final result is a django  template that looks like this:

<p>Here's some XML:</p>
{% filter xmldoc %}
<children>
    <child>Koes</child>
    <child>Chris</child>
</children>
{% endfilter %}

And the custom filter looks like this:

from django.template import Library
from django.template.defaultfilters import stringfilter
from xml.sax.saxutils import escape
 
register = Library()
 
@register.filter
@stringfilter
def xmldoc(value):
    return escape(value).strip()
xmldoc.is_safe = True

Now the XML is readable to the users and the developers.

My sources

• Django custom filters
• I was missing an import in my filter

It has come to my attention that people in Tulsa who work downtown are not aware of many of the great places to eat downtown for lunch.  So I created a map of all the places I know about.  Please let me know if I missed anything.

Tulsa Downtown Food Map

I built the site using Django and Google Maps API