Templates

What's a programmer's favorite part of programming? The finished product? The process of learning a new skill to implement some functionality? Building new worlds to explore? Sure these are all reasons why people might enjoy programming, but I'm going to explain the strange reason why I enjoy programming.

I was working on our website, and was trying to change our view from delivering a simple HTTPResponse() text string to delivering a rendered template file. In doing this, I tried to follow the Django tutorial, but I kept on receiving an error that the template file could not be located. Googling for solutions to the problem just returned results about making sure that template files for specific models are stored with the models. This isn't what I was trying to accomplish. I just wanted a general view for the website. The error explained that it searched for templates in: 

.../projectHAM/templates/site/homepage.html

 but couldn't find the resource specified.

"Umm, excuse me?" I said, "I clearly have that template located in the directory. Just look at my directory structure!"

Clearly there was something wrong with Django, because surely I couldn't have been doing anything wrong. How can I correct an error that the template isn't in the right space when it clearly is located in the right spot. Frustrated and hungry because it was 6:45 pm and I hadn't eaten yet, I left the obstinate computer in a huff.

After coming back from dinner, I sat down to try and make a deal with the computer. Maybe it would be willing to work with me after it had time to cool down a little. It wasn't long until I was able to fix the problem. Can you guess what my error was?

I mentioned earlier that the error said that the template should be located at 

.../projectHAM/templates/site/homepage.html

which is the way I read it when I was trying to solve the problem. What the error actually said was

.../workspace/projectHAM/templates/site/homepage.html

while I had my templates located in

 .../projectHAM/projectHAM/templates/site/homepage.html

I had spent probably 45 minutes trying to figure out what was wrong with Django when I was the one that placed the templates folder in the wrong directory. After this glorious, "Aha!" moment I moved the template directory to the proper place, reloaded the page, and saw the error screen no more.

This enormous struggle that I had that ended in that wonderful moment when you I realized what I had done wrong and exactly what I needed to do to fix it is why programming is so much fun for me. Those small moments when your world is consumed by a problem and then you finally fix it and everything feels right.

With that said, there are two lessons to take away from this:

1. If you spend more than 30 minutes trying to fix an error and aren't sure what to do just drop it, walk away and come back to the problem later. A fresh perspective is one of the most useful tools for solving a problem.
2. Read the whole directory structure, of where template files are supposed to be located. It will save you approximately 45 minutes of struggling with what seems to be an impossible problem.

Now that our website uses templates for returning views, we can do some pretty cool features, like identifying our users by name when they log in. Here is our new "congrats, you're logged in" screen.