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 67529 pieces of comment spam killed since January 2008, mostly via Akismet.

DjangoKit

This week is so busy that I don't have time for a longer post, but I wanted to mention DjangoKit (attentive readers may have already spotted it in the sidebar), an OS X application wrapper for Django projects. Tom Insam went and did something that I've had on my "someday" list for a long time. It's very much a 0.0.1 project right now, but I think it has great potential as an application testbed and as a platform for hybrid apps.

S5 in DjangoKit I pulled out an unfinished Django app of mine that lets you build and present S5 slideshows, and shoehorned it into the DjangoKit wrapper. It works! I can't ask for more at this point. Looking forward to having more time to play.

Tuesday, April 10th, 2007
django + fun + os x
6 comments

Some related posts: DjangoProjectLauncher? • Pocket Django • History lesson • World's ugliest Django app • Django.June wrapup • Google Earth for OS X • Useless script: View180 • Happy indeed

• Comment from Adrian Holovaty , later that day

Oooh -- I'm looking forward to playing around with this.

• Comment from Otu Ekanem , later that day

Hey Paul,

This is not entirely related to your post but the S5 screenshot made me think it might apply.

We built something to allow you easily create webapps and a quite demo I built for BarCamp was a way of creating S5 presentations quickly and easily. You can see the presentation here http://barcamplondon2.hapispace.com.
The actual content is viewable here http://barcamplondon2.hapispace.com?hapitext.

The idea is simply this, you can edit the content of any page on that site and push a button to generate S5's or anything else you might think of.

Sorry for briefly hijacking your post ;-)

Otu

• Comment from Tom Insam , later that day

oooh, I'm impressed. Someone actually downloaded my awful source code, figured out what I was thinking, changed the right bits and shipped their own app.

DjangoKit has had a bad last week, due to an unanticipated coffee/laptop interaction incident, but I'm able to work on it again now...

• Comment from Troy , 4 days later

I've been tinkering with the source and slimmed it down some and expanded some things, when i'm complete i'll post it.

Hope you don't mind.

• Comment from Paul , 4 days later

I assume you're talking to Tom there (it's his code). Seems like there's going to be enough interest in this thing to make it a bonafide public project -- if Tom's amenable.

• Comment from Parker , 20 weeks later

Hello Paul,

That looks to be very promising.

Thanks
Parker