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 67519 pieces of comment spam killed since January 2008, mostly via Akismet.

Django Unicodification

On July 4th, which in America is a holiday involving even less attention paid to international events than usual, a wonderful thing happened to Django. On that day the Unicode branch, whose goal was to make it easier to work with non-ASCII character data in Django, was merged into the main development version (or "trunk" in svn-speak). There's an application porting guide on the Django wiki.

The main reason I'm making this post, though, is because while Malcolm Tredinnick's blog doesn't allow comments (nudge) I wanted to make sure he was publicly thanked for all his hard work on this project. While he notes that the project "was in no way a solo effort", there's no question that Malcolm deserves a huge round of applause, or many pints of beer, or some other international sign of gratititude. The evidence is hard to refute.

You can read more of Malcolm's post-merge thoughts on his blog.

Friday, July 13th, 2007
django + python + web development
2 comments