E-Scribe News : a programmer’s blog

About Me

PBX My name is Paul Bissex, and e-scribe.com is my consulting business. I build web applications using as much open source software as possible. From September to June I teach web design and other important non-photographic professional skills to photographers. In the '90s I wrote technology commentary and reviews for magazines, newspapers, and web publications, including Wired, Salon.com, FamilyPC, the late lamented Web Review, and the Chicago Tribune. Feel free to email me.

Book Project

I'm co-authoring a book, "Python Web Development with Django", with Jeff Forcier and Wesley Chun. It will be published by Prentice Hall in July 2008, but is available for pre-ordering on Amazon now.

Colophon

This site is built on a fresh trunk checkout of Django, running on Python 2.5.1, served by Apache and mod_python. The database is SQLite. The operating system is FreeBSD, on a VPS hosted at Johncompanies.com. Comment-spam protection by Akismet. Vintage topo imagery from the Maptech archive.

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Stuff I Use

Akismet, del.icio.us, Django, dpaste.com, Emacs, FreeBSD, Freenode, jQuery, LaunchBar, MacPorts, Markdown, Mercurial, OS X, Postfix, Python, SQLite, Subversion, TextMate, Trac, Ubuntu Linux, wmii

A Django site.
(Finally!)

Copyright 2008
by Paul Bissex
and E-Scribe New Media

Flock, a browser for bloggers

Flock, a Firefox-based browser with special features for bloggers, is now available in "Developer Preview" form. Because it's based on Firefox, stability and performance are pretty well ironed out. The interesting stuff, in brief, is:

Those are the ones that struck me the most, but there's more; read the intro pages that appear by default when you launch Flock.

I like it, but since 1) I'm not much of a del.icio.us user, and 2) my homebrew blog doesn't (yet) support any of the standard APIs, I don't feel compelled. Also, the engine is Firefox, which may be the best thing going on Windows and Linux, but on the Mac lags Safari and Camino in terms of visual polish and "nativeness."

Anyway, the Flock crew is clearly having a lot of fun and they are doing something very interesting. It was bold to do this by forking a new client instead of just trying to do it all via Firefox extensions, but I think it was the right decision. People who don't actually try it will say things like "blah blah, what's so new about this, I already do that in my browser using blah blah blah."

I think that a dedicated fanbase is going to emerge quickly. Because of the nature of Flock, these people will be very active web users who blog and share photos and post their bookmarks to del.icio.us, and that means it's going to gain visibility very quickly. I'm sure those clever Flockers realize this. So what happens after that?

Saturday, October 22nd, 2005
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