‘Twas google/ig, and the odeos
Did skype and quimble in engrade:
All simpy were the buzzingos,
And the feedpaths carbonmade.
“Beware the Frapprflock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Yubnub bird, and shun
The del.icio.us Offertrax!”
He took his orkut sword in hand:
Long time the slawesome foe he sought –
So rested he by the Numsum tree,
And stood awhile in thought.
Eric Meyer recently wrote a post titled “Flummoxed by Frameworks” that received a lot of commentary. I belatedly added my own two cents. I have a feeling that this isn’t the last time the subject will come up; I’m copying my own response here (along with the link to Eric’s post) mostly so that I can find it later when I want to explain this to somebody else!
Eric, you mention that you wrote all of An Event Apart’s registration stuff using PHP and MySQL. I take this to mean that you did it once. Imagine if you did it three times, or five times, or fifty times for different clients, with minor variations. Imagine how sick you’d be of re-implementing the same core features over and over. Your approach would change a little bit with each job, as you discovered better ways to implement certain features. Imagine the nightmare of trying to support all those clients each one using a slightly different snapshot of your learning process.
I built a toy site using Django’s “generic views” last night. Basically this means that for the first time I created an app without writing any real code – I defined a model, wrote some rules mapping URLs to Django’s generic view functions, and made some templates that get called by that view code (I spent most of my time fussing with the templates!).
This would have been pretty easy to hack up in PHP, too, but there are lots of things that would have been just as easy to not do the “right” way – things like clean URLs everywhere, redirect-after-POST (to avoid multiple submissions), custom error pages, a polished admin for inspecting and editing the data, nicely modular templates. Django made it easier to do it right than to do it wrong.
The MacBook is out today. It’s a bit more than an iBook replacement; for Apple laptop fans this single detail from the tech specs page says that loud and clear:
Extended desktop and video mirroring: Simultaneously supports full native resolution on the built-in display and up to 1920 x 1200 pixels on an external display, both at millions of colors.
Finally! Goodbye, unauthorized hacks.
At 5.2 pounds it’s about the same weight as the old Titanium.
This week at work we’ve been dealing with a hellish situation: our colocation provider (who will for now go unnamed) wiped out the live backup of one of our drives – then overwrote the drive with a seven-day-old tape backup. Nice going, guys! So now I’m digging through my “stashed-this-away-just-in-case” backups for missing data from the past week.
We’re switching to JohnCompanies.com for hosting – I’ve been using them for nearly three years for my own stuff (including this site), quite happily.
…is, according to Technorati, Chinese. And likely will be forevermore.
I got an e-mail from Steve Cook today.
For a couple years now I’ve been using a great little utility Steve wrote called Jumpcut. It’s what I call a “clipboard stack” – it records multiple cuts/copies and allows you to paste them back out in whatever sequence you wish. And it does all this without requiring you to use the mouse – essential.
(I was led to Jumpcut by a comment on this post of mine from June 2004. Thank you, “sal paradise,” whoever you are…)