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.

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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

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At least 67551 pieces of comment spam killed since January 2008, mostly via Akismet.

Two new Django-powered sites

One of the neat things about PyCon, even for those of us who aren't attending, is that people save up goodies to announce and release during the conference. Django is certainly a hot topic at this year's PyCon, and as of today at least two significant new Django-based sites have launched:

One is CheeseRater (great name!), from Jacob Kaplan-Moss, a quick-rating system for items in the Python community's official package index, the Cheeseshop. In other words, if you think PyOMFG is the greatest module ever you can vote it up, and if you notice that PyFlockOfSeagulls hasn't been updated since 1992 you can vote it down. The Cheeseshop is one of several pieces of python.org that I've thought could benefit from the application of some crowd wisdom; Jacob gets a prize for taking action. It will be interesting to see how this evolves.

The other new launch is the very cool Django Snippets by James Bennett, a repository for pieces of Django code that aren't applications or projects -- helper functions, template tags, models, etc. I remember the day James mentioned via IRC that he was starting to work on this thing, and am excited to see it going live. Users can attach tags and comments and ratings to individual snippets, which will help newcomers orient themselves. I expect this to grow into a key resource for the Django community. James is using the same great Pygments colorizing library that I use on dpaste.com. (Speaking of which, I was briefly despondent that James had completely obsoleted my little pastebin, but I think it will actually be fun figuring out how to keep my site going in a way that complements what James is doing.)

Jeff Croft covers both in some more detail (and modestly notes that he had a hand in their design too).

Sunday, February 25th, 2007
django + programming + python
4 comments

• Comment from James Bennett , later that day

I've actually got an item in the FAQ explaining how it _doesn't_ obsolete dpaste; I see them as two different resources (dpaste is "I have this code and need people to look at it and help me", snippets is "I have this code and want people to use it").

• Comment from Paul , 3 days later

Cool, thanks. I seem to have recovered!

• Comment from Tim G , 1 week later

CheeseRating is indeed a great idea - there's a sort of analogue of it in one of the Perl CPAN web interfaces, and it's a good way to provide feedback to a module author without the rigmarole of joining a mailing list etc.

Sadly, neither one of these two sites is currently making a compelling case for Django (they're both down as of right now). I'm sure it's just a temporary snag though.

• Comment from Paul , 1 week later

Yeah, looks like bad server weather in Kansas today!