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

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 96060 pieces of comment spam killed since January 2008, mostly via Akismet.

Serious squatting

With everybody and their brother trying for the past couple years to bust into the the online calendar market, how is it that calendar.com is sitting there with one of those stupid fake-search-engine advertising pages?

Way back in the '90s, Skip Montanaro of Music-Cal fame put it to good use. Digging through the archive.org history it looks like he may have sold it to mail.com.

I had to do a whois to see that mail.com still owned it. What the hell happened to that company? Sitting on calendar.com for the past two years is an astounding move. Or, rather, lack thereof.

Monday, March 5th, 2007
business
1 comment

• Comment from Dave , 3 weeks later

Tell me about it. I recently went domain name shopping and was astounded to find that there are so many dictionary words taken and being used for nothing but fake search sites. They are parked by their owners who are simply trying to make a buck.

I actually contacted the owner of one such site to see if he would be interested in selling it. He wanted $7K!

I've owned a dictionary word domain name for a decade or so and over the years have been contacted a few times about it (it's not for sale) but no one has ever offered me anything more than a few hundred bucks.

I did finally settle on a domain name for a new venture. It's a two word domain name and it cost me less to register six different TLDs than it originally cost me to register my first domain name.

Funny thing was the guy wanting $7K for his idle domain took offense when I said he was a squatter. He thinks he's a legit business man.