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Massive police raids on suspected protestors in Minneapolis
Over-zealous cops are the most pathetic, disgusting, worthless human beings on the face of this planet.
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Afternoon lights
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NETTUTS: Quick Fire With Jeff Croft
Jeffrey Way at NETTUTS asked me several rapid-fire questions in this fun interview.
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Using Akismet with Django’s new comments framework
Great example of how badass the Django signals framework is. Basically, it lets you inject code upon some event happening, such as an object being saved, deleted, or in this case, a comment being posted. I use signals throughout Savoy, such as to geolocate an object as its saved, and to add a tumblelog object when particular types of content are saved. It’s good stuff. This example also uses Django’s brand-spanking new comments framework.
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Capital Radio
Wonderful radio station site from the talented team at GCap. Really nice from the bottom up — Django-based CMS, nice design, good content. I dig it. Congrats to Simon Willison, Robert Lofthouse, and whoever else was involved in this one.
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Excerpt: ‘Watch You Bleed: The Saga of Guns N’ Roses’
Oh man, this book by Stephen Davis sounds great. WANT. I’ve said for years that GNR is maybe my favorite rock band ever (this, coming from someone who’s not really much into rock). Check out this bit from the intro:
> An old man limped over to them. He gave them the once-over, seeming to linger over Bill’s cowboy boots. Bill was becoming uneasy now, his friend noticed, which was never a good thing, because, when agitated or upset, Bill’s behavior could get a little out there. Finally, the old man spoke, or rather squawked, in a high-pitched shriek: “DO YOU KNOW WHERE YOU ARE?” The boys, taken aback, just looked at him. “I SAID, DO YOU KNOW WHERE YOU ARE?” Bill Bailey said, “Uh, we’re just trying to get to…” “YOU’RE IN THE JUNGLE, BABY!”
Bill Bailey, of course, is W. Axl Rose’s childhood name (but interestingly, not his given name). Sounds awesome.
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Matt Brett redesign
Matt has redesigned his personal site. It’s brown and pink, so you know I love it. Matt’s stuff is always full of great texture, good typography, and awesome little details. Check it out.
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Ubiquity for Firefox
The latest from the amazing Aza Raskin, Ubiquity for Firefox is sort of a Quicksilver for your browser. Definitely cool stuff.
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Django in Linux Magazine
Frank Wiles has a nice piece on Django in the latest issue of Linux Magazine. He talks to Django lead developer Jacob Kaplan-Moss and covers all the basics. Both Frank and Jacob worked for the Lawrence Journal-World back when I did and have since moved on. In fact, Frank led the team that built a very cool Perl web framework called Gantry (http://www.usegantry.org/). It’s a little known bit of trivia that the Lawrence Journal-World actually is home to not one, but TWO open source web frameworks. Not bad for a small-town newspaper in Kansas, huh?
Not god enough for you? How about this: Linux Magazine is also based in Lawrence. :)
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Django 1.0 release party
Django 1.0’s release party will be at the Tied House in Mountain View on Saturday, September 6th at 7pm. I totally wish I could be there. Don’t feel sorry for me, though — I’ll be trying to find some hot karaoke action in London at the time. :)
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Las Vegas Sun Weather
Really nice design work on The Las Vegas Sun’s new weather page. And of course, I’d be remiss to not point out that it’s Ellington and Django-powered. ;)
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Garrett: Why does it take so long to update iPhone applications?
I’ve wondered the same many times. Most apps are smaller than a typical MP3 — and yet it takes probably 10 times as long to install an app than it does to copy over a song. Why?
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Django comments app refactored (finally)
Since the first day I started working with Django in January of 2006, Jacob told me that the comments app would be rewritten before Django 1.0. It’s become something of a joke to me. Whenever someone says a feature is coming in a future version of Django, I throw out the classic, “oh yeah, along with the comments app refactor, right?”
Well today, that vaporware solidified into something real. The new version is documented, combines the old
CommentandFreeCommentmodels, and makes use of all the modern Django APIs that didn’t exist when the first version was written. It looks quite nice.I’m really curious to see just how many people who already have comments on their Django site go to the trouble of switching to the new app. I know I probably won’t. The trouble is, the old app was so — well, old — that almost everyone has written their own, or adopted something like Eric’s django-threaddedcomments. While it looks like it’s pretty easy to upgrade from the old comments app, I’m not sure anyone is really using the old comments app — and switching from custom apps, like the one I’ve written, wouldn’t be nearly as easy.
I think I’ll use the new
django.contrib.commentsgoing forward for sites that it feels appropriate for, and I’ll probably steal a few ideas from it for my own comments app — but migrating jeffcroft.com to it just seems like more trouble than it’s worth.That’s definitely not a dig on the new system though — like I said, it looks very nice. Kudos go to Thejaswi Puthraya, who did most of the works on the new system as part of Google’s Summer of Code, and Jacob Kaplan-Moss, who I know has had this thing on his radar for a very, very long time.
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northtemple: journal of design
> The Northtemple Journal of Design is a periodic design journal, published online and in print, on topics covering the entire field of design. Starting this month, we’ll publish articles twice a month online, written by members of our team of 29 designers, as well as guest authors and design experts. Every quarter we will collect the past quarter’s articles and publish them in a more permanent medium.
Sounds like a plan. Cameron wrote the first article, and it’s great.
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Django Documentation
The Django documentation has been entirely refactored. It’s much more readable online, now. I like.
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The Python Property Builtin
Adam Gomaa explains the Python property built-in and some clever ways to use it with Django. I particularly like the caching-of-URLs suggestion at the end of the article.
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Pro CSS Techniques: by Jeff Croft, Ian Lloyd and Dan Rubin
Dan made us a site for Pro CSS Techniques. Sure, the book was released almost two years ago — but better late than never, right? The site Dan designed is beautiful. Ian and I couldn’t ask for a better promo for our book. Thanks, Rubin!
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Platte Woods, Aug 22, 2008
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The vexed question of punctuation
Some great typesetting rules here. Most of them don’t really apply to the web (that is to say, they should, but we simply don’t have the control to allow for them), but there are a few that do. I was particularly excited by the rules for emoticons, which I’ve always wondered about. I’d created this rule for myself; I’m glad to see someone else agrees:
> A smiley may coincide with a closing bracket (given that it is preceded by an opening one :-).
(Note to Sara Flemming: your ass-backwards open-paren-colon smileys destroy all meaning these rules may have had (:). See!?
Via Dan Mall.
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Jon Tan: Typeface != Font
The difference between “typeface” and “font” is one of those things where you know it doesn’t really matter when people use them interchangeably, but when you know the difference, it still grates on your nerves to hear them used incorrectly. By the way, if I haven’t said it before: Jon Tan’s site has some of the best web typography around. Check it out.
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Simon Willison joins Guardian News & Media
> Former Yahoo and Lawrence Journal World developer Simon Willison has been recruited by Guardian News & Media as a software architect.
Big congrats to Simon, one of the smartest and nicest guys this industry has to offer. Sounds like a great gig. I can’t help but wonder: will we see a Django-powered Guardian in the future? ;)
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My first Django pluggable: django-mailfriend
I finally got the balls to put some of my code out there. This simple app allows for “e-mail this to a friend” functionality for any instance of any model in your Django database. If it sounds interesting, check it out. I’d love feedback. As you know, I’m a designer first, coder second, so I’m quite sure some of my code is not as optimal as it could be. Hopefully someone will find it useful.
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django-timezones
A pluggable app for working with timezones in Django. Looks very useful. Brian Rosner and James Tauber are definitely leading the pluggable app charge — both are putting out a lot of useful stuff. Thanks, guys. Via Simon.
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Tools We Use: Textmate
Kenny has a nice post over the Blue Flavor blog detailing a bunch of reasons why TextMate rocks our socks off. I sort of hate to admit it as someone who identifies as a designer moreso than a coder, but TextMate is probably the single most-used and most important piece of software on my Mac. I use it for everything.
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iPhone GUI PSD
Apparently is prototyping elements day on jeffcroft.com. Here’s an awesome-looking PSD full of iPhone widgets. Via Wilson.
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GUIMagnets: Prototyping made sticky
Small flexible magnets with GUI widgets on them, designed for use while prootyping on a whiteboard. Freaking great idea. Via J.B..
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14 Ways to Use Twitter Politely
All good tips. And yeah, I’ve probably broken all of them at one time or another. Doesn’t mean I don’t think they’re good tips.
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EveryBlock adds Seattle!
EveryBlock added Seattle to its list of cities — as well as Boston and D.C. Sweet.
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Eric Meyer: The Lessons of CSS Frameworks
Again from Jeremy’s great live blogging of An Event Apart San Francisco, here’s Eric on CSS frameworks. I’m glad to see someone else broaching this topic, and in general it looks like Eric did a great job of rounding ‘em up. A few bits and responses:
> If you’re going to use a framework, it should be yours; one that you’ve created. You can look at existing frameworks for ideas and hack at it. But the professionals in this room are not well served by picking up a framework and using it as-is.
Generally speaking, I agree. I have made great use of Blueprint — but it’s worth nothing that almost all of the basic concepts were created by me (along with Nathan and Christian). As Blueprint has progressed, it’s gotten farther and farther away from what we created, and I’ve been less enthralled by it. The point is: something you created yourself is always going to be more useful to you than something you didn’t.
> Four of them use psuedo-namespaced class names beginning with grid- or container- or span- (which you would apply to a div!?).
I’m not sure if the parenthetical is Jeremy or Eric speaking, but this is also worth noting: in the original CSS framework Nathan, Christian, and I created, you were not necessarily supposed to apply those classes to a
Visitdiv. The classes were for any element, and there was no encouragement to liter your markup with extraneousdivelements. The original Blueprint retained this philosophy, but later changed it, asking people to always usedivelements as columns. I find this to be incredibly wrong, and I always override this Blueprint functionality when I use the framework. If you are going to use adivfor every layout column/row/unit/whatever, you may as well just use tables. I hope everyone knows and understands that when I was touting Blueprint, it was before the made the boneheaded decision to require the use of adivelement for every column. -
Django: Inserting and Positioning Images
Via Jacob, here’s a clever method for using Markdown to insert images into the content of a blog post, article, or whathaveyou. As Jacob notes, it’s similar to the concept of “inlines,” pioneered in Ellington, and later implemented in Nathan’s Basic Apps and my Savoy. It’s not as flexible as inlines (with inlines, you can insert any object, not just images, and you can access all attributes of your object, not just the file URL), but it’s a lot simpler, too. If you just need to plop images into a chunk of text, this will work great.
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Zeldman on web design
From Jeremy Keith’s live blog of Jeffrey Zeldman’s talk at An Event Apart San Francisco:
> It’s hard being a web designer. The unmotivated need not apply. You have to constantly educate yourself. There are plenty of tutorials out there on using web design tools like Photoshop, Flash, Dreamweaver, and so on. But teaching Excel is not the same as teaching business. Knowing how to use Photoshop and Illustrator doesn’t make you a web designer.
Yes. Yes. YES!
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Addictionary redesign by Bryan Veloso
An absolutely gorgeous design by Bryan here. Great typography, great simplicity in the colors. I love it all. Also, how about that product name? Addicitionary, for a social dictionary? Perfect. I read it three different ways: “A dictionary,” “Add dictionary,” and “Addicition-ary” (which I assume is the way it’s pronounced). Clever.
Also, see Bryan’s retrospective on the design.
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Panic’s Steven Frank on the App Store
Steven has a great piece on how the iTunes App Store is simultaneously the best mobile application distribution platform ever and downright scary for developers who want to make their stuff available from it.
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Cyberstar
The Chicago Tribune has a lengthy profile of EveryBlock founder and Django co-creator Adrian Holotvay. Despite the super-lame title, the piece is actually really good, and, at least from my interactions with him, captures Adrian’s personality quite nicely. Adrian does seem to have that “everything I touch turns to gold” thing going for him — he’s definitely deserving of a nice profile in his hometown paper.
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GoTime Seattle
A sort of lawrence.com for Seattle. Overall, seems pretty good, but it is sadly missing RSS feeds. I’d love to have a feed of happy hours.
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CounterNotions: Why Apple doesn’t do “Concept Products”
A really nice piece on “concept” products, such as those we see all the time from car companies, Nokia, Microsoft, and the like:
> It turns out that when capable designers are given real constraints for real products they can end up creating great results. In Apple’s case, groundbreaking products like the iMac, the iPod and the iPhone. Constraints have a wonderful way of focusing the mind on the fundamentals, whereas concept products can often have the opposite affect.
Design is all about constraints, and concept products inherently remove most of them. Apple seems to spend most of its time focusing on products I can build today (or in the near future), rather than on what might be possible 10 years from now.
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Webmonkey: Build a Microblog with Django
A nice piece on Webmonkey about how to build a basic tumblelog with Django. The technique used is similar in concept (but a bit simpler) than what I’ve done here at jeffcroft.com. Note, though, that the Django signals bit in the article refers to the syntax for signals before a recent API change, so you’ll need minor changes to the code in the article to make it work with the current version of Django.
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Creating Social Networks Few Want
Moveable Type and Wordpress are both touting new “social networking” features for future releases. The question is: does anyone care? Do people really want to start their own social networking sites around their blog? From what I can tell, these are attempts to add features that will generate media buzz, not features that will get users excited about the product. I could certainly be wrong, though. What do you think?
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CNN launches “backstory” feature
I’m not really sure I like the Coverflow-style UI CNN.com is using for this, but I like the concept, as it solves one of my longest-standing complaints about online news. As a person who doesn’t really keep up on news day-to-day, I often jump into a story several days in (when something gets really big, instead of at the very beginning). The problem I often have is that the articles I find at that point are all about the latest developments in the story, and often assume I already know how it all started and what has happened to date. This “backstory” feature attacks that problem by providing a chronological UI to all the stories related to a particular current event. It works, but I personally would rather just see a chronological list of bullet points that catches me up without all the glitz. Still, I’m happy to see someone trying to address the problem.
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Note to Self
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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