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.

Pile o'Tags

ajax apple blogs browsers business design django ebay fp fun google hardware haskell intellectual property iphone javascript linux media mobile open source os x oscon oscon2007 palm php programming python rails rants reading risks ruby site spam textmate the well tips vcs web development web frameworks webservers wmassdevs

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

How to say you're sorry

When I came across this set of outage notices on the Google AdSense site tonight I couldn't resist turning them into a general-purpose, public access tool that apologizes for broken websites in 23 languages.

For example, let's say you're the webmaster for Happy Fun Ball Corporation and you accidentally overwrite the web server's document root while backing up your ASCII art collection, and it's the day of a global product launch. No problem!

Saturday, December 31st, 2005
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2 comments

Some related posts: World's ugliest Django app • STFU • Web developer evolution • The Million Beta Homepage • Brainbenched
• Comment from Billy, later that day

they all came thru but when saving it & then reopening it, 4 failed, cool idea though (yes UTF-8), thx

• Comment from Paul, 1 week later

Thanks for the feedback. Not sure what the problem is there. I've saved and re-loaded the output in a Unicode-aware editor (TextMate) with no problems. It's possible I've done something wrong on the encoding end, though, so I'm open to suggestions.

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