Jacob Kaplan-Moss

“Syntactic Sugar”

The traditional view of languages — human or computer — is that they’re a tool we use to express thought. But modern literary and linguistic theory holds that it’s a two way street: our thought drives our language, but the language we use leaves an indelible imprint on our thought processes.

(language, linguistics, syntax)

Typography: Rhythm & Proportion

Lessons from The Elements of Typographic Style: rhythm and proportion.

(bringhurst, css, design, typography)

Minimalism

The minimalism bandwagon’s leaving — jump on! Jump on!

(jacobian, me, minimalism)

REST worst practices

Some REST “worst practices.”

(api, rest, worstpractices)

PyCon Braindump

There are some great roundups of the content at PyCon out there; this isn’t one of them. See, I have this notebook (Moleskine FTW!) I carry with me everywhere, and now it’s chock-full of note from PyCon; this is a braindump.

(2007, braindump, django, pycon, pycon2007)

Help OSI

Bruce Perens is running for the OSI board and needs support.

(opensource, osi, politics)

Sailing on…

A look back at the years I’ve spent a the Journal-World, and an announcement about the future.

(jobs, lawrence, me, whiskeymedia, worldonline)

A picture is worth a thousand words

“… supporting only Ascii is uninternational to a point that’s almost offensive …”

(ascii, i18n, paulgraham, unicode)

Shameless self-promotion

I’ve got a couple of sweet upcoming speaking/teaching gigs coming up, and now I’m going to pimp them out.

(ego, me, speaking)

Django Book Update

The Django Book is finished!

(djangobook)

Of the Web

A general impression of how CouchDB fits into the big picture of the Web.

(couchdb, http, web)

CouchDB first impressions

I’m playing with CouchDB tonight. Here are some first thoughts, as they occur to me.

(couchdb)

The sorry state of database journalism

I’ve been following with interest as Derek Willis explores Caspio, a sort of hosted data-driven web app tool for journalists. This post started out as a comment on his blog, but soon ballooned.

(caspio, databases, journalism)

My “personal security” plan

Prompted by recent reading on cryptography and computer security, I’ve been rethinking my pretty lax personal security plan. Taking to heart the lesson that the best security is open, I ‘m posting my plans publicly for comment.

(cryptography, plans, security)

Seasoning Templates

A few words about salt.

(design, django, salt, templates)

Die, Marker Felt, Die!

Like everyone else, I got sick of looking at Marker Felt on my iPhone. So I did something about it.

(helevetica, iphone)

Dear Adobe

Acrobat Reader blows ass.

(acrobat, adobe, gigantic-mountain-goat-testicles, rants)

Some guesses about the future

There’s a fun thread over at Poynter’s Online-News mailing list about what the future might hold for digital journalism. I thought I’d post my contributions here as well.

(future, poynter, predictions)

Django projects

I’ve always thought that the sign of a healthy Open Source project is a vibrant ecosystem around that project. That’s why I’ve been thrilled to see that there are a bunch of cool third-party Django add-ons popping up. I thought I’d take a few minutes and give a shout out to some of my favorites.

(django, django-openid, django-registration, django-tagging, django-voting)

Django Internships at the Journal-World

I’m extremely excited to announce our new internship program here in Lawrence. Starting this summer we’re going to be hiring interns to join our kick-ass team and learn the ropes.

(django, internships, jobs)

Circles of Django

So here’s a question I get asked a lot: “How big is Django’s community?” Read on to see me fail to answer this question.

(community, django, opensource)

You vs. the Real World

“Be liberal in what you accept.”

(postels-law)

Jimbo’s Number

Watching Wikipedia slowly die is sad, but there’s apparently a lesson here.

(jimbo, wikipedia)

Ripped by Engadget

I got ripped off by Engadget, and I all got was this lousy t-shirt.

Wait, I didn’t even get one of those…

(cc, engadget, journalism, licensing)

Five things I hate about Python

Inspired by Titus (who was in turn inspired by brian d foy), here’s what I hate about Python. I completely agree with Brian that you can’t trust any advocate who doesn’t know enough to find stuff to hate. Given that I spend a lot of time advocating Python, writing down what I hate seems a good exercise.

(hate, python)

Overheard at PyCon

Quotes from PyCon.

(2006, pycon, pycon2006, quotes)

I don’t care whose is bigger

Really, I couldn’t care less who’s got a bigger penis.

(get-a-life, rants)

Fried Chicken

I’ve been trying to make outstanding fried chicken for about four years, and I think I’ve finally got it. I don’t mean to toot my own horn, but I just made the best damn fried chicken I’ve ever had, and it wasn’t even all that hard. If you like the crispy stuff and aren’t afraid of phrases like “heat a quart of oil to 375°”, read on…

(chicken, recipe)

How the news breaks

I swear, sometimes this programming thing is really just the digital equivalent of baling twine and duct tape.

(behind-the-scenes, duct-tape)

Wanted: kick-ass sysadmin

Want a job? We’re hiring a sysadmin.

(django, jobs, lawrence, worldonline)

Pronouncement

If Guido gets to Pronounce, I do, too.

(bdfl, django, pronouncement)

Post-OSCONum part 1: try not to suck

Part one of my thoughts after attending the Open Source Convention.

(oscon)

“Show-stoppers”

Lately a large number of questions posted to django-users have included phrases like “this is a show-stopper” or “this is critical”. I think it’s worth my time to point out that this is a lousy method of getting developers to do what you want. It’s the online equivalent of threatening to take your ball and go home, and is about as effective.

Here, then, some advice on the right ways to get your pet bug fixed quickly.

(bugs, django)

Digg dugg

I got Dugg, I got reddited, and all I got was this lousy t-shirt.

Warning: This post contains profanity. Read on at your own risk.

(digg, django, scaling)

Bad dog!

The dog ate my DSlite.

(ds, dslite, ohnoes)

Improved text image view

I just found this in my django-ego-feed: 23 excuses: Simple Django View for Dynamic Text Replacement

I’ve been using something similar to generate the titles for the site (look at the title above for an example), so I’m pretty familiar with the technique.

Andrew’s code over there is pretty good, but I’ve got a few improvements he and you might be interested in.

(django, imagereplacement)

Django OSCON shirts

I’m about to print up some Django shirts to take to OSCON next month — got any ideas?

(django, oscon)

Django propaganda

Some Django propaganda to keep us rolling on…

(django, propaganda)

A complete waste of time

My post-lunch time waste hack of the day.

(chicagocrime, greasemonkey)

Django meetup in Palo Alto

If you live in the Bay Area or will be in Palo Alto on April 27th, I want to buy you dinner.

(django, meetup)

Merquery

Brian Beck just announced that he’s beginning work on Merquery, a full-text indexer and search engine specifically designed for developers using RAD frameworks like Django.

(django, search)

Quiet Enjoyment

Wherein we discover that at least one lawyer has a sense of humor.

(eula, quiet-enjoyment)

Free server? Probably not

As the saying goes, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

(niagra, sun)

Free servers?

So Sun’s giving away T2000 servers for free — maybe.

(niagra, sun, t2000)

Django stuff at Pycon

Here’s some links to the Django stuff I showed off at Pycon.

(django, pycon, pycon2005, sudoku)

WWBD

What Would Bill Do?

(funny, news)

Template + Cache = Crazy Delicious

Here’s a simple class for a template tag that caches its output (with apologies to Chris Parnell and Andy Samberg).

(cache, django, template)

Why you should use Django

Inspired by Guido van Rossum’s plea to be taught web frameworks here are (in no particular order) ten reasons why he — and you — should use Django.

(django, propoganda)

Strike averted

I’m thrilled to announce we’ve hired James Bennett (a.k.a ubernostrum in #django) as World Online’s new front end developer.

(jobs, ubernostrum, worldonline)

Done

After far too long, I’m finally done.

(snakesandrubies)

Dojo gets a manual

Since my last post hit the Dojo folks pretty hard for the lack of documenation, I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out that they now have a manual online.

(docs, dojo)

Django, meet Dojo

After hearing some rave reviews of Dojo on django-dev, I finally got around to checking it out today. Here are my thoughts (with an obvious focus towards) using Dojo with Django).

(django, dojo)

Have more…

And now a word from our sponsors.

(quotes, shakespeare)

Django performance tips

Django handles lots of traffic with ease; Django sites have survived slashdottings, farkings, and more. Here are some notes on how we tweak our servers to get that type of high performance.

(django, performance)

Hiring, part II

Besides the Django developer position I posted about yesterday, we’re also hiring a front-end web developer.

(django, jobs, worldonline)

We’re hiring!

Want to work for the most innovative news organization in the country, if not the world? Want to join a team of the best and brightest online media developers? Want to get paid to create award-winning web sites?

Well, have I got the job for you: World Online is looking for a kick-ass web developer to join our team.

(django, jobs, worldonline)

Lightpd on Ubuntu

Here’s how to install lighttpd from source on Ubuntu in a pleasent, Ubuntu-ish way.

(lightpd, ubuntu)

What can Django learn from Rails?

One of the questions asked at Snakes & Rubies was about what Django could learn from Rails (and vice versa). Once I finish wrestling Final Cut Pro to the ground you’ll be able to see how Adrian and David answered the question, but in the meantime it got me thinking about some cool features of Rails that are worth ripping off… er… being inspired by.

(django, rails, snakesandrubies)

allofmp3.com RSS feed

I use and love allofmp3.com, but the site lacks an RSS feed of new music. So I created one.

(allofmp3, rss)

Private Dancer?

As I was going over some notes on our internal wiki, I ran across a list of rejected names for the framework that become Django.

(django, funny, names, private-dancer)

A note to web designers

When a job listing says it requires knowledge of web standards, don’t bother applying if you haven’t changed your markup since 1998.

(markup)

A quick comparison

My take on Microsoft versus Linux.

(opensource)

Sera’s Pancakes

My fiancée’s kick-ass pancake recipe — somewhere between a crêpe and a pancake.

(pancakes, recipes)

Django and Rails

My feedback on Sam Newman’s comparison of Django and Rails

(comparison, django, rails)

Reboot

I’m back.

(reboot)