I recently visited the website random.org, which is a free/fee-based generator of random numbers.  It's been around for a long time - since 1998.  It made me revisit the concept of randomness and how oddly hard it is to achieve. Why is randomness important? It's amazing how many things rely…

A new study accepted for publication in the British Journal of General Practice asserts that the majority of general practice websites contain content well above the recommended reading level for online content. The study analyzed 3,823 pages of content scraped from 813 Scottish general practice websites.  Analysis showed that 2,942 pages…

Whenever I go to a website, my eyes go immediately to the year. You'd be surprised how many websites say 2006 or 2002 or even 1999. At best, is demonstrates no attention to details and at worst it proclaims the site as abandoned. At Imaginary, we have our site and...

Imaginary has implemented two high tech tools to foster a decidedly low tech essential for success - frequent and productive client collaboration.

2019 was an interesting year in website accessibility.  The simple and elegant premise of accessibility has been pushed aside by aggressive law firms, miserly corporations and apathetic regulatory agencies. In October the Supreme Court decided not to hear the appeal of Guillermo Robles v. Domino’s Pizza LLC.  The background is...

In the world of web development, particularly open source web development, there are two fundamental requirements that you should ask of any new web development vendor – code isolation and server isolation.  Whenever possible, you must insist that the underlying code that runs your website is isolated and under your...

It boils down to this. An upgrade costs money, sometimes a lot of money, but the result has no visible outcome. In fact, in many cases the only outcome is an assurance that you've reduced the probability of attack, intrusion, breach and related unpleasantness. By any measure, that's a tough...

Imaginary Landscape Ranked Among the Top Five Web Developers in Chicago and Among the Top Python and Django Web Developers Worldwide.

Independent OWASP Top 10 Security Risk Audit for Python-based Websites.

Although no formal set of guidelines have been released, website owners are encouraged to immediately comply with level A and AA of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines as published by the World Wide Web Consortium. Aggressive law firms have had success bringing suit against organizations whose websites are not...

Django is being used by corporations worldwide.  Every day, Imaginary does its part to increase this footprint by deploying Django websites and applications to our clients. As a result, Django is being exposed to greater numbers of end users. I'm not talking end user developers.  I'm talking Samantha in marketing...

This week, Google announced a radically new way of handling human detection with a revamped reCAPTCHA.  This new iteration, called No CAPTCHA reCAPTCHA replaces the hard-to-read distorted text image transcription with a simple checkbox. We've never been big fans of CAPTCHA technology.  It transfers the burdeon of proof from the server to...

A 2014 study released by the Harvard Law Review shows that an alarming number of hyperlinks go bad in a surprisingly short time. Link Rot has been a problem from the very beginning of the web.  Over time, websites can come-and-go and redesigns can change the location of content -...

The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame recently announced their 2015 nominees.  At the same time, they opened up a Fan Voting application so that music fans across the world could make their selections known. Rock Hall approached Imaginary a couple weeks prior and asked if we could design an...

Below is a PDF of the slides for today's DjangoCon US presentation, "Trial By Fire: Real World Performance Optimization" by Joe Jasinski and Dan Johnson (Tuesday, September 3, 2013 - Track 2). Presentation Slides

This week, The Onion arrived at the Imaginary Landscape office to film a short segment for their website, "CEO Has Special Knack For Recognizing Great Ideas and Ruining Them."  Featured in the film was Imaginary Landscape's own Jenn Sedik (Tara Callies), Dustin Lacewell (Jason Rutherford) and Joe Jasinski (Tim Williams)....

I'm happy to report that the DjangoCon schedule has been announced and we have two presentations that made the cut. Joe Jasinski will be making the solo presentation, "So You Want to Make a Payment: Comparing and contrasting Django payment options" which will introduce and compare some common payment gateway options,...

As a Web developer with a specialty in creating and maintaining hospital websites, it is important that we fully understand where these things intersect with HIPAA.  In fact, any agency that is charged with the creation, care and maintenance of a hospital website must fully understand these things. One of...

People feel strongly about these bills and are jumping on any bully pulpit to instill fear in the hearts of the non-supporters (or supporters, depending on the pulpit).  As with most impassioned controversy, most of the coverage is limited to the polar extremes.  Each side focusing on the most liberal...

Imaginary Landscape was highlighted in a recent blog post as one of only two Corporate Members of the Django Software Foundation. The post appears on the Django Project website and was written by DSF President Russell Keith-Magee.

Many thanks to Joe Jasinski and Eric van Zanten for their presentations on GeoDjango at November's Chicago Djangonauts meetup. Joe kicked off the evening with his presentation, Introduction to GeoDjango.  The presentation was based on his recent blog post GeoDjango Quickstart.  Joe has also provided his presentation slides. After a...

We just recently discovered an issue where a programming decision affected the ease (or lack thereof) of establishing goal funnels in Google Analytics.  What we also discovered was that it was completely avoidable with a little better communicatioin between our Django programming staff and our analytics staff.  As is typical...

Having scheduled the first meeting of the reanimated Chicago Djangonauts, I didn't know what to expect.  There were a number of RSVPs on Facebook and a couple through the chicagodjango.com site, but you never know. We ordered three cases of beer from our favorite brewer and 13 pizzas from our...

For the fourth year in a row, we have just completed our sponsorship of PyCon.  Each time I return to the office after the conference ends, I am filled with a particular energy.  This year that energy is more pronounced. In many ways, our day-to-day work is done in relative...