mylazyhouse.com

In this series of posts, I will show you how to build a blog like this one using Codeigniter (CI) and jQuery. In the first post, I will explain how to install and configure codeigniter so we can begin building your blog.

I was recently moving some backend code to python, and I quickly realized that I've never worked with a database within python (outside of django). After some quick googling I found the MySQLdb package. MySQLdb is a wrapper for the _mysql api, and it allows you to interact with your MySQL database from within python. In this article I will show you how to install and use MySQLdb.

After falling into web development, I wasn't sure what programming language to use. 'Web' programming languages I knew were Python, Ruby, and a little PHP. While I really like the speed and 'feel' of Python, and heard (many, many, many) times about how cool Ruby is (it is. more on that later), I chose PHP. I knew that there were many popular sites written in PHP, every hosting company supports PHP, and it has a 'similar' syntax and flow as my background (C). I know there are millions of people who hate PHP, and I actually agree with a few of their arguments (Though a good programmer should know to sanitize input (RE: PHP == exploits)). I realized that PHP, like Perl, allowed me to hack up a solution easily and quickly, albeit the end result may be a bit ugly. Well this is where Codeigniter (CI) and Model-View-Controller (MVC) come to play. Four years and 15 or so projects later, I realized that, with PHP, my code is not very pretty. Read that as, I would be embarassed if someone had to maintain/debug/(and in some cases)see my code. Now this is not PHP's fault, I actually like the fact that I can always hack something together and make it work, but I would like a little more 'constraint' with how lazy I can get.