Django Designer Initiative

Posted on October 20, 2008 by Trey

This is important. What people don’t know is hurting them. There is an destination in your search for a general purpose CMS. If you’re ready to hear it, I’ll tell you. It’s free, incredibly powerful, and it has a large community of über-dorks ready to do something cool for you — help them out. Django needs you.

The promise of an easy to use web framework is old. I’ve been hearing about it as long as I’ve been in the field. Nothing has delivered all the glory that has been promised, but it’s closer than you might think.

The promise for me has always been something that’s easy enough that a front-end developer could build cool things themselves without begging hardcore programming geeks for a hand. In my experience, when you have to ask for help, chances are it’s not going to get built.

This is a plea to both ends of the spectrum.

To developers working with Django: we are painfully close to a solution that more than developers can appreciate. As it is now, most of the designers I know of who have built something impressive with Django have been current or past employees of World Online. It’s one thing for people on a first name basis with core Django developers to build something cool, and another entirely for a random front-end designer who has a great idea she wants to build to get something done.

Great turnkey solutions can be built. Something as easy to get running as WordPress is possible. And so much more powerful. It would give a tremendous boost to spreading the word about how much more pleasant it is to develop websites using Django.

To designers and front end developers: please look past the status quo of blog software and CMSs and demand something that works the way you think it should work. There is no reason to shoehorn a CMS into WordPress. There is no reason for you to have to settle for half-assed. Find a developer who is in tune with the cutting edge and collaborate.

We all need for this to happen. It’s been too long that we’ve been struggling with sub-par tools. We all need to step up and demand more.

Posted in Web | Tagged |

Reciprocality

Posted on May 22, 2008 by Trey

Reciprocality

I read about Reciprocality when I was working at helpdesk at Tennessee Tech years ago (perhaps linked from Slashdot?). It seemed really compelling, and I keep thinking of it from time to time.

I will periodically have thoughts like “what was that thing I read years ago that seemed to explain things and was kind of freaky?” Wikipedia says it verges on pseudoscience.

An article that I saw on Hacker News today reminded me of it.

I haven’t read about it in years, and didn’t re-read the site before posting this, but here it is.

Posted in Random |

How to Comment on Tumblr

Posted on April 23, 2008 by Trey

If you haven’t already sign up for Tumblr.

Tumblr Signup Form

Find an entry that you want to comment on and do one of the following:

If it’s not in your dashboard, click the ReBlog link in the upper right side of the screen:

How to Reblog a Tumblr post that\'s not in your dashboard

If it’s in your dashboard, click on the recycle icon:

How to reblog a Tumblr post from inside your dashboard.

Write your comments either above or below the existing text (or erase it entirely):

Adding a comment to a Tumblr post

Save it (see, Tumblr knows this is special content — it’s “ReBlog post” instead of “Create post”):

Tumblr ReBlog Post button

Go back to your Dashboard if you’re not already there. Click on the reblogs link:

Tumblr show ReBlogs button

Revel in the social nature of your online existence! Just use WordPress if you need more functionality than that!

Tumblr ReBlogs displayed

This is how I’d like to see comments work on regular blogs anyway. I guess that’s the point of trackback links.

Posted in Consuming, Web | 2 Comments

History

Posted on April 16, 2008 by Trey 
history|awk '{print $2}'|sort|uniq -c|sort -rn|head

Work computer:

98 gst
66 git
63 st
41 cd
34 gca
32 svn
29 ls
24 gb
16 up
11 mate

Linux staging server in my basement:

142 ls
125 cd
70 sudo
26 cat
19 git
12 mysql
11 exit
10 rm
9 mkdir
8 svn

Explanations:

The top ten commands entered on the command line and the number of times.

  • gst = git status
  • st = svn status
  • gca = git commit -a
  • gb = git branch
  • up = svn update

See also:

Posted in Random |

Trey’s Philosophy of Link Design

Posted on February 19, 2008 by Trey
  1. Hovering over a link should always emphasize and never de-emphasize the link. Don’t make it harder to read!
  2. A visited link, if it changes, should be de-emphasized, but not so much so that you can no longer tell if it’s a link.
  3. It should be obvious what is and what isn’t a link.
Posted in Web | 1 Comment