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

Python Web Development with Django I'm co-author of "Python Web Development with Django", an excellent guide to my favorite web framework. Its strong points include an introduction to Python, and better coverage of Django 1.0 than nearly anybody else. Published by Addison-Wesley, it is available from Amazon and your favorite technical bookstore as well.

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.

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 tools unix 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

Spam Report

At least 59052 pieces of comment spam killed since January 2008, mostly via Akismet.

Django as superego

I built a toy site using Django's "generic views" last night. Basically this means that for the first time I created an app without writing any real code -- I defined a model, wrote some rules mapping URLs to Django's generic view functions, and made some templates that get called by that view code (I spent most of my time fussing with the templates!).

This would have been pretty easy to hack up in PHP, too, but there are lots of things that would have been just as easy to not do the "right" way -- things like clean URLs everywhere, redirect-after-POST (to avoid multiple submissions), custom error pages, a polished admin for inspecting and editing the data, nicely modular templates. Django made it easier to do it right than to do it wrong.

The site is a "pastebin" app, so as a bonus it gave me a convenient way to share the source. Insert pro forma apology about quality of code here.

http://paste.e-scribe.com/

Tuesday, May 16th, 2006
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2 comments

Some related posts: Making your way from PHP to Python and Django • World's ugliest Django app • Django Unicodification • Django.June • Handling legacy URLs with Django • Moving the blog to Django • A minimal wiki in Django • WebKit screen-grabbers • Controller freaks • Python web framework mania
• Comment from Dagur , later that day

Very handy! Now I just wish gedit and/or pydev did syntax highlighting like that.

• Comment from Panos , later that day

Plain and simple. I like it. I couldn't have thought it would be that simple to make a pastebin with django.

Then again, all you gotta do is try, as you showed us :)

Thanks for food for thought.

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