Matt has redesigned his personal site. It’s brown and pick, so you know I love it. Matt’s stuff is always full of great texture, good typography, and awesome little details. Check it out.
Details and comments »The latest from the amazing Aza Raskin, Ubiquity for Firefox is sort of a Quicksilver for your browser. Definitely cool stuff.
Details and comments »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. :)
Details and comments »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. :)
Details and comments »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. ;)
Details and comments »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?
Details and comments »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 Comment and FreeComment models, 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.comments going 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.
Details and comments »> 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.
Details and comments »The Django documentation has been entirely refactored. It’s much more readable online, now. I like.
Details and comments »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.
Details and comments »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!
Details and comments »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.
Details and comments »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.
Details and comments »> 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? ;)
Details and comments »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.
Details and comments »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.
Details and comments »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.
Details and comments »Apparently is prototyping elements day on jeffcroft.com. Here’s an awesome-looking PSD full of iPhone widgets. Via Wilson.
Details and comments »Small flexible magnets with GUI widgets on them, designed for use while prootyping on a whiteboard. Freaking great idea. Via J.B..
Details and comments »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.
Details and comments »EveryBlock added Seattle to its list of cities — as well as Boston and D.C. Sweet.
Details and comments »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 div. The classes were for any element, and there was no encouragement to liter your markup with extraneous div elements. The original Blueprint retained this philosophy, but later changed it, asking people to always use div elements 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 a div for 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 a div element for every column.
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.
Details and comments »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!
Details and comments »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.
Details and comments »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.
Details and comments »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.
Details and comments »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.
Details and comments »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.
Details and comments »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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