Posts tagged: DESIGN

I just posted this mini-rant over at reddit.com in response to implications that Python is somehow selling out by getting a more business-friendly makeover.

Here’s the thing about the new site being “too corporate” or whatever.

Python is not a band with a MySpace profile and an awesome debut album. It’s a programming language. Programming languages live if they’re used, and more or less die if they’re not used. Enthusiasts, e.g. reddit users, will find what’s cool regardless. Corporations, on the other hand, need to be marketed to. If you love Python, you should love the idea of it putting on a little bit of professional dress – because that ultimately means you are more likely to actually get paid to program in Python down the road.

This must have happened over the weekend. The redesigned python.org has launched. It’s a huge visual improvement over the old design, which really hadn’t changed much in, oh, about seven years.

The Python community has achieved a gradual, grudging acceptance of the idea that marketing and presentation matter, but I think it was Ruby on Rails that really drove it home. Ruby (a very cool language in its own right) has seen a huge surge in popularity in the past year, driven largely by the excitement around Rails. Python.org has been sitting around looking dowdy.

I’ve tiptoed into the Web 2.0 world by adding a couple small Ajax features to the blog.

First, there’s now a “More” link at the top of my Random Bookmarks sidebar which fetches another seven random links from the server and plugs them into the page without reloading.

Second, I added a gratuitous animated roll-unroll toggle to the comment form, and made it closed by default. OK, that’s not Ajax, that’s just fluff.

I’ve been enjoying listening to the “Audible Ajax” podcasts from Ajaxian lately. One of the older shows was a talk by Lugradio’s Stuart Langridge in which, in an aside, he mentioned a table sorting widget he had written. It sounded cool. When I got home I fired up the browser and found it: sorttable.js.

Even though it’s over two years old and doubtless there are a bazillion Ajax (tm) toolkits that include supersets of this functionality, I find it to be a very elegant thing. Largely that’s because of its utterly configuration-free operation. As long has you’ve put <th> headers on your table, you just include the script in your page, and set class="sortable" and a unique id on each of your table(s); clicking on a table header re-sorts the table by that column, without any action on the server side at all.

Seen on Flickr: this huge collection of Web 2.0 company logos. You can argue with the taxonomy but it’s still fun to look at.