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David Ryan
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David Ryan
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Matt and James
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Matt and James
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Jacob and Sera
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Only Veloso…
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Only Veloso…
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TurboDjango 0.95: Django templates on TurboGears
Thanks to Django’s modularity, you can now use its template system with TurboGears. Django’s template system has also been copied and turned into Liquid for Rails. Everyone wants to use Django templates, even if they’re not on Django (and I don’t blame them)!
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Designing for Mobile - Blue Flavor
Brian Fling and the BlueFlavor crew have put together one of the best set of presentation slides I’ve seen on a long time. This looks like an amazing presentation. Wish I could be there.
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Behold the Humboldt Squid
There are white sharks in the Sea of Cortez, but getting chomped by one of them wouldn’t be nearly as eerie as getting eaten alive by a jumbo squid.
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Tesla Motors
Jacob’s been talking about this car for a while, as a friend of his is involved with it, but he couldn’t say much, thanks to NDA. Now, it’s all out in the public, and it’s amazing. Something of a cross between an Elise and a Ferarri design-wise, the thing performs amazingly well and is 100% electric. In my opinion, rich people have a duty to buy one of these things.
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23 excuses: Source Release and Django Semi-Tutorial
Andrew at 23excuses releases the source code for their multi-user blog engine and providees a nice tutorial on Django, to boot.
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Yahoo! offers DRM free, “personalied” music download
For $1.99, you can download a version of the new Jessica Simpson single in which your name is inserted into the lyrics. There a lot of things I’d like Jessica Simpson to do. Saying my name is not one of them (unless maybe she will call me “Daddy”). Jokes aside, this is actually notable, as it’s the first DRM-free release from a major label on a major digital music store. Who woulda thunk it’d be Jessica Simpson?
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Squeaky Clean CSS
Some nice tips on managing your CSS files — keeping them tidy, clean, manageable, and maintainable. We’ve got a chapter on this topic on Pro CSS Techniques — I think it’s something that’s really needed.
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Installing Django on Mac OS X
A nice step-by-step on installing the development version of Django on Tiger. Uses DarwinPorts and SQLite.
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Content with Style: CSS is Worthless
A reminder that almost all of the oft-named “benefits” of using CSS for layout are actually benefits of using good, clean, semantic (X)HTML. Lighter page weight, better SEO, no kludgy presentation tags making your code hard to read — all actually have to do with (X)HTML, not CSS.
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Abercrombie on sidewalk sale day
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Top ten things that suck about Django
By now, everyone knows I use and like Django a lot. But it’s not perfect. There are definitely things I think could be better, as well as things I think should exist that don’t. The good news, of course, is that Django is open source, so it wouldn’t be terribly hard for a talented programmer to create patches to take care of some of these issues. In fact, some are already being taken care of.
So, to prove I’m not such a Django fanboy that I can’t see fault in it, I give you my list of the Top Ten Things that Suck About Django. Feel free to add your own, and especially feel free to create patches to solve any of these issues!
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Shiira 2.0 - A Visual Preview
I don’t expect Shiira to ever become a major player in the browser space, but damn I sure won’t complain if Apple incorporates a few of these UI enhancements into Safari. Very sexy-looking indeed.
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On bureaucracy
In the past five years, I’ve held three different jobs. My perception of each can be summed up like this:
- Washburn University: I say, “wouldn’t it be cool if…” My boss says “No, Jeff. Go sit down.”
- Kansas State University: I say, “wouldn’t it be cool if…” My boss says, “Yeah, that would be cool. Hopefully sometime we’ll have the resources to do something like that.” And once in a while, we did.
- World Online: I say, “wouldn’t it be cool if…” I get no response. I think I’m being ignored. Fifteen minutes later, Jacob or Matt pastes me a link to a first draft of the application in IRC with a comment like, “this what you had in mind?”
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Still hot.
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Still hot.
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Pixy: Let’s Favelets
Really nice selection of fav/bookmarklets for your use, many relating to web development.
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CNN MONEY Magazine: Best places to live 2006
According to Money, my hometown (Olathe, KS) is the 13th best place to live in America. Overland Park (minutes away from Olathe) is the 6th best. Lawrence, KS, where I live now, is the 19th best place for singles and the 20th “most educated” city in America. All three of these Kansas cites are within 30 minutes of one another. Interesting stuff, and a nice example of “database journalism.”
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SPACE INVADERS: video / performance
People sitting in an auditorium acts as pixels in this stop-animation video of a Space Invaders game. Too funny, and yet totally amazing at the same time.
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Fireside Chat with Khoi Vinh and Jeffrey Veen at SvN
A nice idea from the guys at 37s, Khoi and Veen joined them in a Campfire room for a informal chat. Haven’t read it fully yet, but I’d listen to Khoi Vinh read the phonebook, so you can bet I will.
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A Tragedy Forgotten: The KC Hyatt Regency Skywalk Collapse
Brian Ford (who happens to be my cousin) remembers the Kansas City tragedy twenty-five years later. The city has mostly forgotten about this, and it’s sad. There should really be a memorial.
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Win with me on Blingo
Since it’s been a long time since I’ve done anything to encourage my reputation as one of the Internet’s more vocal purveyors of Free Shit™, I thought I’d take a moment to invite all of you to join me on Blingo. Blingo is a search engine, powered by Google, in which simply performing your daily searches can garner you goods — things like iPods, PSP, iTunes gift cards, VISA gift cards, and more.
I’ve been using Blingo for about six months now, and have won three times: two iTunes gift cards and a VISA gift card. Nothing super-exciting, but not bad for doing the exact same searches I’d be getting nothing in return for on Google. You can use Blingo without joining me as a friend. Just go to Blingo.com and search normally. However, establishing friend networks on Blingo increases chances of winning, because when someone you invited wins, you win too!
To use Blingo without being my friend, you don’t have to give away any personal information at all (until you win — then you’ll need to tell them where to ship your prize). To join Blingo as my friend, you do need to give them your e-mail address — but they won’t sell it to other parties.
If you’re going to search the Internet, why not get Free Shit™ for it?
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Beginning CSS Web Development, By Simon Collison
Coming very soon, and aligned with an advanced book I’m working on for Apress, I’ve read the first several chapters of Simon’s new book and it’s terrific. If you’re just getting into CSS development, you’ve got to have it.
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How to live happily with a great designer
These are brilliant tips for managerial types, and if Sue Jarchow, my old boss at Washburn University, had understood them, I might still be there making them look good. Instead, they have this.
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Top 30 Django Tutorials and Articles
Nice collection of links to some great Django tutorials. Remember, these are all in addition to the (mostly great) documentation on the official Django site.
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Next-Gen App Frameworks
A Rails user take a cursory look at Django and Symfony and compares them to Rails. He says a lot of really nice things about both (even if a few points about Django are inaccurate…comments have corrected him). Still, he concludes that the two are “playing cathup” to Rails.
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Django… awesome.
A developer who’s tried about every framework under the sun, including some very obscure ones, tries Django and calls it “awesome.” Took him just over 24 hours to get a project going that he’d been unable to complete in any other framework.
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Django tips: Hacking FreeComment
James Bennett has a great entry about how to extend Django’s FreeComment functionality with this like comment moderation, auto-moderation after 30 days, and Askimet-based spam-checking. A must-read for any Django weblogger.
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Framework Performance: Symfony vs. Rails vs. Django
Benchmarks have been posted at rubyonrails.com. Summary: “Rails performed much better than Symfony. And Django performed much better than Rails.”
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Phil Dawes’ Stuff » Application UIs - automating the CRUD
Smart stuff here. Use Django’s model layer and admin interface (which any developer can learn in no time flat) for basic CRUD operations, but keep using your preferred development tools (PHP, Rails, Java, whatever) for your application logic.
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LJWorld.com: Clerks II: A lively sit-down with Dante and Randal
Jon Niccum, our film reviewer, sits down with Brian and Jeff of Clerks fame to talk about the sequel, which opens next Friday. Includes an audio clip of the interview. Try not to suck any dick on your way to the website.
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Adrian Holovaty interviewed on the Ruby on Rails Podcast
No, that’s not a typo. How Adrian managed this one, I’ll never know, but the Django lead developer and programmer-journalist is interviewed in the latest edition of the official Rails podcast.
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Django admin for your PHP app?
Let’s say you’re a PHP programmer (or ASP, or Java, or whatever) and you’re about to set sail on a new web app. One of the first things you’ll need is a database schema and some interface for simple CRUD (create, retrieve, update, delete) operations to work with your data. Maybe you’ll write some SQL
CREATE TABLEstatements. Maybe you’ll install something like phpMyAdmin and use its web interface. One way or another, youre going to have to be able to work with that data as you build your app.I’d like to propose an alternative. What if I told you you could write a Django model in less than an hour, and the result would be a fully-functional database, a production-ready, beautifully designed (as opposed that phpMyAdmin) CRUD interface, and you could still write your application login in PHP (or your perferred language)?
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PediaPress - Printed books based on Wikipedia articles
Wow, this is really cool. Generate a printed book, based on the Wikipedia articles of your choice, and print then in a nicely bound book. Made with an AJAXy interface and Django-powered, to boot. You can even generate a PDF preview of your entire book. Awesome.
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Jeff Croft
I’m a digital product designer and developer in Seattle, WA. I currently work with Simply Measured, and recently co-founded Lendle, a Kindle book sharing service.
Some of my past clients include Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo!, Copious, The New York Review of Books, Django, The Lawrence Journal-World, and the University of Washington.
I’ve authored two books on web and interactive design and spoken at dozens of conferences around the world.
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