E-Scribe News : a programmer’s blog

About Me

PBX My name is Paul Bissex, and e-scribe.com is my consulting business. I build web applications using as much open source software as possible. From September to June I teach web design and other important non-photographic professional skills to photographers. In the '90s I wrote technology commentary and reviews for magazines, newspapers, and web publications, including Wired, Salon.com, FamilyPC, the late lamented Web Review, and the Chicago Tribune. Feel free to email me.

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This runs on Django, served by Apache and mod_python. 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.

The Book

Book cover I'm co-author of "Python Web Development with Django", an excellent guide to my favorite web framework. Published by Addison-Wesley in October 2008, it is available from Amazon and your favorite technical bookstore as well. Click on the book title above to learn more.

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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

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DjangoKit

This week is so busy that I don't have time for a longer post, but I wanted to mention DjangoKit (attentive readers may have already spotted it in the sidebar), an OS X application wrapper for Django projects. Tom Insam went and did something that I've had on my "someday" list for a long time. It's very much a 0.0.1 project right now, but I think it has great potential as an application testbed and as a platform for hybrid apps.

S5 in DjangoKit I pulled out an unfinished Django app of mine that lets you build and present S5 slideshows, and shoehorned it into the DjangoKit wrapper. It works! I can't ask for more at this point. Looking forward to having more time to play.

Tuesday, April 10th, 2007
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6 comments

Comment from Adrian Holovaty , later that day

Oooh -- I'm looking forward to playing around with this.

Comment from Otu Ekanem , later that day

Hey Paul,

This is not entirely related to your post but the S5 screenshot made me think it might apply.

We built something to allow you easily create webapps and a quite demo I built for BarCamp was a way of creating S5 presentations quickly and easily. You can see the presentation here http://barcamplondon2.hapispace.com. The actual content is viewable here http://barcamplondon2.hapispace.com?hapitext.

The idea is simply this, you can edit the content of any page on that site and push a button to generate S5's or anything else you might think of.

Sorry for briefly hijacking your post ;-)

Otu

Comment from Tom Insam , later that day

oooh, I'm impressed. Someone actually downloaded my awful source code, figured out what I was thinking, changed the right bits and shipped their own app.

DjangoKit has had a bad last week, due to an unanticipated coffee/laptop interaction incident, but I'm able to work on it again now...

Comment from Troy , 4 days later

I've been tinkering with the source and slimmed it down some and expanded some things, when i'm complete i'll post it.

Hope you don't mind.

Comment from Paul , 4 days later

I assume you're talking to Tom there (it's his code). Seems like there's going to be enough interest in this thing to make it a bonafide public project -- if Tom's amenable.

Comment from Parker , 20 weeks later

Hello Paul,

That looks to be very promising.

Thanks Parker

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