I like Django, MySQL, and Unicode, but getting all three to play together nicely can sometimes be a bit challenging. One of the more annoying things is getting Django to make a migration that will create a 255 character CharField that is encoded using the utf8mb4 character set and indexed.

GitHub profile pages include a neat visualization of commit history that they call the "contributions calendar". This 53x7 grid shows the number of commits and other GitHub interactions that the user performed on each day for the last year.

Each cell in the graph is shaded with one of 5 possible colors. These colors correspond to the quartiles of the normal distribution over the range [0, max(v)] where v is the sum of issues opened, pull requests proposed and commits authored per day.

I was inspired by Ivan Zuzak's post to try using GitHub issues on the repository for this blog to collect and display reader comments. I'm using Octopress to generate the site, so I decided to make some customizations to make applying Ivan's ideas easy for me.

I started by adding a new configuration setting to my _config.yml file: github_comments: true. I'll use this configuration switch to turn the new feature on in other places in the codebase.