In PHP, it was extremely easy to start hacking away and figuring out what was going on on a page.  Just throw in a bunch of echos and print_r's and that was about it.  It appears that this technique is not working for me in python.  I am getting practice by hacking around in a python photo upload module, and when a photo is uploaded, it creates 3 different size photos.  I found the code that does this, but I want to see the state at that particular moment.  I tried doing a "print" on the size variable, but it did not show up in my browser.
I guess a more straightforward question would  be, is it "pythonic" do debug using the browser ( equivalent to echo's and print_r's in php ), or is this what the python console is for?  Thanks!
Use the logging module rather than printing stuff to stdout. 
Using the interpreter in interactive mode is a great way to try out code, and pdb is very useful for real debugging.
Experienced Python programmers (ESPECIALLY former php programmers) : How do I debug python?