E-Scribe : a programmer’s blog

About Me

PBX I'm Paul Bissex. I build web applications using open source software, especially Django. Started my career doing graphic design for newspapers and magazines in the '90s. Then wrote tech commentary and reviews for Wired, Salon, Chicago Tribune, and others you never heard of. Then I built operations software at a photography school. Then I helped big media serve 40 million pages a day. Then I worked on a translation services API doing millions of dollars of business. Now I'm building the core platform of a global startup accelerator. Feel free to email me.

Book

I co-wrote "Python Web Development with Django". It was the first book to cover the long-awaited Django 1.0. Published by Addison-Wesley and still in print!

Colophon

Built using Django, served with gunicorn and nginx. The database is SQLite. Hosted on a FreeBSD VPS at Johncompanies.com. Comment-spam protection by Akismet.

Pile o'Tags

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Stuff I Use

bitbucket, Django, Emacs, FreeBSD, Git, jQuery, LaunchBar, Markdown, Mercurial, OS X, Python, Review Board, S3, SQLite, Sublime Text, Ubuntu Linux

Spam Report

At least 236525 pieces of comment spam killed since 2008, mostly via Akismet.

A software manual written using Markdown

TextMate author Allan Odgaard has been working on a user manual for the program, in preparation for next week's final release of version 1.1. He's been writing and editing for a few weeks. As a Markdown devotee (all my posts here are written using Markdown) I was pleased to see this comment in his blog entry about the manual:

Should you somehow have missed my countless references to Markdown then for the records let me just state that the documentation was written in Markdown and I absolutely love it!

It says a lot that after weeks of intensive work he is praising, not cursing, the markup system he chose.

(This also explains all those tweaks Allan's been making to the Markdown bundle lately!)

Saturday, December 17th, 2005
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Some related posts: Joel on TextMate
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