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 71104 pieces of comment spam killed since January 2008, mostly via Akismet.

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
fun + web development
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.