About Me

PBX I'm Paul Bissex, and e-scribe.com is my consulting business. I build web applications using open source software, especially Django. In the '90s I did graphic design for newspapers and magazines. Then I wrote technology commentary and reviews for Wired, Salon.com, Chicago Tribune, and lots of little places you've never heard of. Feel free to email me.

Book

I'm co-author of "Python Web Development with Django", an excellent guide to my favorite web framework. Published by Addison-Wesley, it is available from Amazon and your favorite technical bookstore as well.

Colophon

Built using Django, served by Apache and mod_wsgi. 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. The markup engine is Markdown.

Pile o'Tags

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

Spam Report

At least 71062 pieces of comment spam killed since January 2008, mostly via Akismet.

About.com starting to move to WordPress

Interesting -- About.com is moving to WordPress. I also learned from Matt's blog posting, much to my surprise, that they were using Movable Type before. It feels very significant that the New York Times Company is migrating its $410-million-dollar baby over to an open source content-management platform. The usual open source components further down the stack -- Apache, Linux, et al. -- don't have the same implications for feel and functionality that the content management layer does, and therefore this feels like more of a significant endorsement of open source.

If I didn't enjoy writing my own stuff so much, I'm pretty sure I'd be using WordPress too.

Wednesday, December 7th, 2005
blogs + media + open source
1 comment