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.

Colophon

This runs on Django, 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. The markup engine is Markdown.

The Book

Book cover I'm co-author of "Python Web Development with Django", an excellent guide to my favorite web framework. Published by Addison-Wesley in October 2008, it is available from Amazon and your favorite technical bookstore as well. Click on the book title above to learn more.

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 45600 pieces of comment spam killed since January 12th, mostly via Akismet.

Tim Bray: "No New XML Languages"

I avoid XML as much as possible, but once in a while I've had a project where I thought about making an ad-hoc XML dialect. I'm going to file away Tim Bray's recent blog posting to keep me out of trouble during those moments of temptation. His advice boils down to this: If you are tempted to make a new XML dialect, instead try fitting it into one of what he calls the the "big five":

XHTML (including microformats)
Docbook
Open Document Format
Universal Business Language (I imagine this one covers the greatest number of hey-we-should-do-this-in-XML scenarios)
Atom

He concludes:

The next time one of your technical superstars comes into the room and says We gotta design an XML vocabulary for X, make them prove they cant do it with one of the Big Five. And if they can prove it, sigh deeply and budget a couple of years delay, and a few thousand more engineering hours.

Tuesday, January 10th, 2006
programming + tips + xml