my emacs.d still needs a few tweaks but I'm convinced it always will.

most useful parts: replacing fundamental mode with text-mode as the default mode when a new buffer is open.

(setq default-major-mode 'text-mode)

turn auto fill (automatic line wraping) and flyspell (spellchecking) on by default

(add-hook 'text-mode-hook 'turn-on-auto-fill)

(add-hook 'text-mode-hook 'turn-on-flyspell)

also I find yasnippet http://code.google.com/p/yasnippet/ wonderful for coding html mockups and django templates.

my github repo if anyone cares to take a peek: http://github.com/bmac/emacs