Since I was recently given a hard time for having more content in my TOC than in the blog, I’ve decided to put this space to good use. I’ll be posting various short posts about things that I’ve run into and my workarounds.

First one… I recently installed Snow Leopard. Since all of the web development is done with Python and Django, I installed 64 bit everything, including Python and MySQL. How I did that is a whole other post, but tonight, I realized that the python hash function now can return VERY large numbers. If you’re developing in 64 bit, and you store the hash of any object, make sure that the column type in the database is BIGINT, or you’ll get warnings with every save.

The next release of LocalBeacon is pretty close. For the next release some of the key features are:

• Facebook -> iPhone App. Turn your Facebook fan page into an iPhone application with just 2 clicks (one to login, one to create the channel)
• Tighter integration with YouTube and external content. Will keep your users in the app longer.
• More options to organize your content, including using a bottom tab bar instead of the buttons on the home page to navigate from category to category.

We’re also looking for a newspaper partner to try a more robust integration strategy so everything gets published automatically. If you’re the publisher of a newspaper of any size (college, community, etc.), let us know!