E-Scribe News : a programmer’s blog

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

ajax apple blogs browsers business design django ebay fp fun google hardware haskell intellectual property iphone javascript linux media mercurial 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 writing

Stuff I Use

Akismet, bitbucket, del.icio.us, Django, Emacs, FreeBSD, Git, jQuery, LaunchBar, Markdown, Mercurial, OS X, Postfix, Python, Review Board, S3, SQLite, TextMate, Ubuntu Linux

Spam Report

At least 95844 pieces of comment spam killed since January 2008, mostly via Akismet.

dpaste.com

dpaste screenshot I've re-launched my little Django-powered pastebin (formerly paste.e-scribe.com) under its own shiny new $8 domain name: dpaste.com. Not that the world really needs another pastebin, but people have been using it daily and it's a fun side project. From the about page:

Philosophy: Simplicity and usability. The grayscale look makes the colorized source code stand out. Cookie-based personal defaults eliminate lots of extra form widgetry. Automatic expiry means the database never fills up. Auto-focus on the Code field means mouse-free operation. No required fields means you can paste, tab, return, and go. No running list of recent items means the spammers remain invisible. And Django makes nice clean URLs the path of least resistance.

Some small tweaks made it in with the domain switch, including a delete option and a comment form on the About page.

Thursday, November 16th, 2006
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1 comment

Some related posts: Making your way from PHP to Python and Django • A Mercurial mirror of Django's Subversion repository • Django.June • Two new Django-powered sites • New Year's programming resolutions • TextMate command for paste.e-scribe.com • Pastebin update: Pygments • Moving the blog to Django • The twenty-minute trouble ticket system • "Reverse" game update -- my language safari
• Comment from Yuli , 17 months later

Hi, Paul.
It works great, except for one thing:

font-family: "Bitstream Vera Sans Mono", "Courier New", Monaco, monospace;

This is how the code gets formatted. If you look at the order they come, you'll see that your typical Windows system will use Courier to display the code block. But so will your typical Macintosh system.

You now how you love your fonts on the Mac, right? So this may be a nice touch -- making each system discover their included and native GUI fonts first, and have a fallback for the ocasional weirdness.

font-family: Monaco, "DejaVu Sans Mono", "Courier New", monospace;

What do you say?

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