←Eponymous Blog

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.

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If you haven’t already sign up for Tumblr.

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:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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.

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There’s been quite a bit of talk in the last few days about the state of shared hosting as it relates to the ever-so-popular world of web frameworks. I’ve struggled with this myself, and I understand that it basically amounts to the fact that this kind of web development is new. Newer than the people who are used to throwing .php files on a server are accustomed (myself included).

James Bennett and DHH both think this is time for the web hosts to start putting in work to make this easier for developers. I agree that it’s in web hosting providers’ best interest to make the process easier. However, I also think this is a great opportunity for code monkeys (I’ll count myself as one) to really understand what goes into making a web server tick. There’s more going on than the world of PHP and shared hosting would have you believe.

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In trying to decide which (open source) license to use for Yark, I wanted to see what other projects that I respect were using.

Here are some (listed alphabetically):

• Django: BSD License
• Firefox: tri-licensed under the MPL, GPL, and the LGPL
• Git: GNU GPL v2
• Haml: MIT License
• Linux: GNU General Public License
• Markdown: BSD-style open source license
• PHP: PHP License
• Python: Python Software Foundation License
• Rails: MIT License
• Ruby: GPL and Ruby License
• Subversion: Apache License

So the most popular options seem to be:

• BSD licenses
• GNU General Public License
• MIT License

I get a feeling the cool kids are going for the MIT License these days.

Update: I believe I’m going to go with the MIT License. This page helped me understand things a bit better (via).

Another Update (2008-08-05): Now I’m considering using Apache 2.0 because of this (via).

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