Posted 6 months ago at 2:27 am. 1 comment
I happened upon a pretty cool site today built in Django and focused on the Django community. It’s called Django People, and it’s a giant community of… people who use Django! They did a really good job with the site. It actually really impresses me with how much functionality they packed into it. It’s nearly a full fledged social network. There were fun new things to do around every corner.
The first step, which is the primary feature of the site, is choosing your location. The interface is a little buggy and kludgy for my tastes, but after a few tries I managed to get my location down right. You can upload an icon, add sites that you have worked on, add tags for your interests (nginx is of course one of my tags!), specify whether or not you’re open to work opportunities, and a ton more. It also gives you ways to get in touch with others near you, as well as ways for people to get in touch with you by showing things like your Twitter site, your AIM account, and other things.
Overall the guys (should I say, guy and gal) who developed Django People did a great job. The design, although sufficient and easy to use, isn’t very gorgeous at all, but it’s fun to use and should prove to be a helpful tool as more Django developers begin to use it.
Check out Django People here, and view my profile here!
Posted 6 months ago at 9:03 am. 2 comments
Not too long ago, a good friend of mine and I were sitting in a coffee shop in the middle of Honolulu. We were trying to think of a small and fun project we could build together. After some thinking we both decided to bring CSS Thesis, an old and very popular CSS gallery back from the dead.
CSS Thesis was once a popular online gallery which featured some of the nicest and cleanest sites on the web. I mean, come on, the one and only Whalesalad was featured on it at one point. Haha. But really, it was a clean site with a very defined focus: show designers really awesome websites, and let them vote very easily. So, we decided to build it from the ground up.
The new site is built on CodeIgniter and runs on Nginx in a teeny 256mb slice from Slicehost. We’re running it through its paces and so far its handling pretty well, but we’ll see. A review of Slicehost is sure to come. Hopefully they don’t become slicehosed like DH and MT.
Go check out the new CSS Thesis, and submit a few sites!
Posted 6 months ago at 7:38 pm. 3 comments
I’ve been hearing a lot about Comet recently. Comet is essentially a type of AJAX which works by having the server constantly sending data to the browser, rather than having the browser constantly polling the server for more data. Things like Gmail’s Chat functionality and Meebo are perfect examples of Comet-like technology. The main difference between AJAX and Comet applications is that Comet applications deliver data to the browser any time, whereas AJAX applications require user input (for example a small refresh icon).
I stumbled upon an awesome Asynchronous Comet server for Django today, called django-evserver. The video shows two different browsers showing a chat log, where each browser automatically shows new messages when the other submits data. Pretty cool stuff, and seeing this running with Django is totally awesome. Note to self: This is all related somehow to WSGI, which is something I definitely need to get my tiny brain wrapped around. I’ve heard lots about WSGI and know of a few things which are beneficial to me regarding it, but don’t know too much about it.
Hopefully I’ll work on a project one of these days that can utilize technology like this. +1 for Django!
Check out the blog post here, which contains a video demonstrating the technology.
Posted 6 months, 1 week ago at 1:09 pm. 7 comments
Today I found a pretty cool blog post discussing PHP vs Ruby performance. A lot of people in the web community are suggesting that Rails is slow and it doesn’t scale. A lot of these people making these accusations happen to be PHP people, and so in suggesting Rails is slow and cannot scale they are in essence suggesting that PHP can.
In the article they benchmark PHP vs Ruby, as well as Python, Perl, and C++ for comparison. It’s important to see the distinction between Rails and Ruby. I work at a Python development house (rockin’ Django) and it’s cool to see all this crap hitting the fan all over the interwebs from Rails. Ruby itself is a great language. It’s also cool to see Python, the little quiet guy in the corner of those charts, smoking the pants off of everyone with the exception of C++. With Psyco (a Python JIT compiler) Python was even quicker than C++.
Check out the post here.
Posted 6 months, 1 week ago at 12:57 pm. 1 comment
Radiohead is broadcasting live right now in London, England. I’ve got the web stream open in VLC right now.
If you want to watch too, open this stream in VLC.
mms://live.wm.radiohead.servecast.net/hosting_wmlz_radiohead_160108_300k
Posted 6 months, 1 week ago at 10:55 pm. 0 comments
One of my readers, Matt, recently discovered a syntax bug in the Elixir theme. I’ve updated all of the themes and put them on the server. Happy downloading!
In case anyone was wondering, the error was on line 8 of header.php, where the ending <? } ?> needed to be changed to <?php } ?>.
View the official Elixir page here. (That’s where you can download it)
Posted 6 months, 2 weeks ago at 1:58 am. 4 comments
Like the jock at school admiring the creepy girl over in the corner (Juno reference, hah) I’ve been hiding in the shadows and observing Slicehost from the distance. Slicehost is the new kid at Hosting High, and offers VPS hosting for developers. A VPS, or Virtual Private Server, is the “ultimate mix of price, performance and power” according to Slicehost, which gives you nearly all the benefits of your own dedicated machine, without the hassle and cost.
There are quite a number of popular bloggers and web developers out there who evangelize Slicehost with credit on their blogs, and it’s certainly working. So much so, that I don’t even need a VPS, and I want my own slice. Whalesalad runs on a dedicated server fully configured by me. It’s running on the blazin’ fast Nginx web server and has never suffered a moment of unexpected downtime on this machine. A great breath of fresh air from Dreamhost back in the day, and even (mt)’s grid server. Despite all of that, the thought of Slicehost powering Whalesalad sounds pretty cool in my head.
So why do I want a pice of the Slicehost pie? I’ve been marketed, virally. In three letters they’re simply rad. They offer services designed with the developer in mind, and the guys they host have nothing but killer things to say about them. They have a strong community which seems to be growing exponentially, and they give back to the entire web community with articles on everything from Capistrano to Subversion.
Every cool kid at the web designer lunch table is rockin’ a creamy portion of Slicehost goodness. Slicehost is so successful that not too long ago, I remember they had to cease fulfilling new server requests right away because they couldn’t keep up with the demand. In a world full of “Wordpress Cannot Connect To Database” shared hosting hell, Slicehost is quite the breath of fresh air. I’ll definitely be giving them a shot with some sort of project, sometime soon. That $20 a month slice is lookin’ mighty tasty.
It’s a shame their website looks like it was made by a ten year old with a CSS book on christmas morning. Hey Slicers, if you’re listening, I’d love to give redesigning your site a shot. You could surely use a sleek and sexy new site to match your explosive expansion.
Update: I’m now using Slicehost for two of my web projects and couldn’t be happier. I hope to post a review soon, but Slicehost is powering my CSS Thesis website (http://thecssthesis.com) as well as a pre-production staging server for Schoolrack.com.
Posted 6 months, 2 weeks ago at 4:45 pm. 4 comments
I really love Barack Obama’s new website. I’m not too sure about my stance on him leading our country as president, but his website definitely kicks ass. Visit The Site Here
Posted 7 months, 2 weeks ago at 12:46 am. 10 comments
I recently stopped using Firefox on my MBP and started using Apple’s latest Safari 3 browser included in Leopard. I was never a very big fan of Safari because I came from a Windows world where Firefox reigned. Plus, I use Firebug essentially daily, for anything from actual web work to just hacking little bits of web pages to work properly.
Safari is much, much faster and also uses significantly less memory than Firefox. However, it certainly would be nice to have some web debug tools built right in to Safari. It turns out that Safari does include debug tools. Traditionally I used Webkit to take advantage of the debug tools Safari had to offer, which is actually the development version of Safari. But, Webkit also has its problems. Luckily, there is a very simply way to get the debug tool from Webkit, in your standard Safari browser!
defaults write com.apple.Safari IncludeDebugMenu 1
Run this in your terminal with Safari not running, startup safari, and then you’ll be able to run the Debug tool in Safari!
Curious as to how you activate the inspector? Just right click anywhere on a web page and then select “Inspect Element”.
Posted 7 months, 2 weeks ago at 8:55 pm. 1 comment
I’m not quite sure what’s going on over in Dragon’s neck of the woods, but he’s brewing something up in his lab. All of his sites are pointing to what is apparently being code named Aphelion. It seems to be counting down. As of now we’re 13 days away from the big release which should occur on December 22nd. Check it out.
