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. I teach photographers web design and professional skills. 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. 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

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 67593 pieces of comment spam killed since January 2008, mostly via Akismet.

STFU

E-Scribe is not, strictly speaking, a standards organization. However, I think the time is right to release this draft document on an important Internet standard. The document is presented inline here for convenience; however, the preferred permanent reference is: http://e-scribe.com/stfu

Recent trends in internet-based application development have
fostered the rapid spread of asynchronous, Javascript-based techniques
known by the umbrella term "Ajax" and by related terms such as "AHAH",
"POX", and so on.

This brief paper argues for a plaintext, synchronous alternative style
with some compelling advantages, one of which is (naturally) a catchy
name.

Synchronous Text/plain For User-agents -- STFU -- is a content-
delivery standard offering simple, reliable, high-performance routing
of content to Internet end-users. Implementation is orders of
magnitude faster than for typical Ajax applications, with a
corresponding drop in defect rates.

It's that simple. STFU.

  * well-tested
  * cross-platform
  * highly scalable
  * enterprise-ready
  * supports Unicode!
  * compliant with Section 508 Accessibility Requirements

One prominent adopter of STFU technology is the Internet Engineering
Task Force, which uses it for the dissemination of their most
important documents:

  ietf.org/rfc/rfc-index-latest

STFU also sidesteps technical quandaries related to markup formats,
such as those summarized here:

  hixie.ch/advocacy/xhtml

It's no accident that the author of the above (widely cited) document
chose to deliver his important message via STFU.

Sometimes the debates over emerging standards and technologies become
wearisome, and pragmatic individuals find themselves wishing for a
magic phrase that might quiet the true believers and allow all
involved to move on to more productive activities. May we recommend:

STFU!

If you are already using STFU, you are welcome to display this PNG badge: