Rick Hurst Web Developer in Bristol, UK

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learning something new

today I really feel like i’ve learn’t something new. for example at the simple end of things how to cut and paste and tab between applications and windows within applications on a mac (there’s an apple key godammit!), and at the slightly more complicated end of things, how to download and install python libraries/modules on unix, and most excitingly (for my inner geek) how create python test scripts for web apps using mechanize.

Mechanize is a technology that allows you to open web pages within a virtual browser (i.e this all happens in code, you don’t actually see anything), and do things like submit forms, follow links, check the content of tags etc. The idea is to create a set of scripts to perform tasks on a website such as creating an article within a content management system, using the HTML user interface, without needing to actually have a real browser open or someone’s time taken up creating articles called "sdfsdfsfdf" (as test articles are invariably always called).

This means that once the scripts are set up, we can run them intermittently as we work on a project to check whether anything has been broken since the last test.