E-Scribe News : a programmer’s blog

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

ajax apple blogs browsers business design django ebay fp fun google hardware haskell intellectual property iphone javascript linux media mercurial mobile open source os x oscon oscon2007 palm php programming python rails rants reading risks ruby site spam textmate the well tips tools unix vcs web development web frameworks webservers wmassdevs writing

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.

Markdown

When I was starting this site and designing the software that powers it I decided that I didn't want to use raw HTML for writing posts. After 10 years of authoring HTML I still find it visually obtrusive, and somewhat distracting when trying to focus on writing. I considered both Textile and RST but ultimately settled on Markdown. The implementation I use is Michel Fortin's PHP Markdown, which has worked flawlessly.

I find that, as advertised, Markdown is great for writing text (and hypertext). The source is very readable -- which makes the writing process a lot easier, especially for longer posts -- and I almost never need to write straight HTML.

I use Markdown for the comment engine, too, though some of my HTML-tag-stripping is problematic there. I suppose I could improve the user experience with live comment previewing...

Thursday, October 6th, 2005
+

Some related posts: Site tweaks

Post a comment

Thanks for reading! Please note: Your comment will not appear until approved, which may take a few hours or more. Spammers will be torpedoed.


(Will not be shared)

(Optional)