Moderated by Adrian Holovaty, panelists Matt Waite (St. Petersberg Times), Maura Chace (Atlanta Journal-Constitution), Matt Croydon (Lawrence Journal-World), and Ben Welsh (Los Angeles Times) discuss Django and journalism at DjangoCon. Really good stuff here. The discussion ranges from what’s great and not-so-great about Django in a newsroom to the general decline of the newspaper industry to how to get the “pointy-haired bosses” at traditional media organizations to buy into something other than the “pageviews equals dollars” worldview that is helping to destroy serious journalism in favor of photos of Lindsey Lohan. Really good talk. Visit site »
Probably the single most relevant DjangoCon talk for most Djano developers, this fireside chat with Adrian and Jacob really covers the bases on where the framework will go in the future. As a sidenote, it also is a nice showcase of Jacob and Adrian’s personalities: they’re both really, genuine nice guys who are bright as hell but not at all opposed to criticism or other views (traits, which, in my view, have permeated the entire Django community). I’ve had my arguments with both dudes, but in the end, I love ‘em both. Great guys. Visit site »
EveryBlock added Seattle to its list of cities — as well as Boston and D.C. Sweet. Visit site »
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. Visit site »
A nice interview with Django co-creator and “journalism via programming” pioneer Adrian Holovaty. If you’ve been drinking Adrian’s kool-aid for a while (as I have), you’re not likely to find much new here, but if you aren’t familiar with Adrian and what he does, this interview should give you a nice overview.
42 Topics also has interviews with several others in the Django community, including Jacob Kaplan-Moss and James Bennett, available for your perusal. Visit site »
Jon Udell interviews Adrian Holovaty, creator of Django, EveryBlock, and ChicagoCrime, and all-around computer journalism guru. 41-minute MP3. Visit site »
My buddy Rex, formerly of MSNBC.com, interviews Adrian Holovaty on his awesome startup venture Everyblock. This is absolutely the best interview with Adrian since the launch. Visit site »
EveryBlock has launched. Congrats to Adrian, Wilson, and the rest. Extremely well-done! Read their launch message. Visit site »
Adrian Holovaty, Wilson Miner, and their other partners are launching EveryBlock this afternoon. Those in the journalism industry have been waiting for several months to see this site, as it’s being put together by the core of folks that bought us ChicagoCrime.org, Django, Ellington, Lawrence.com, and some other very noteworthy web journalism projects.
I got myself a small sneak preview, and I can tell you: it’s worth the wait (at least if you live in one of EveryBlock’s launch cities). That’s all I’ll say, for now. Look for a review of EveryBlock here at jeffcroft.com in the coming days. Visit site »
DjangoBook.com, the online location where you can get the entire text of Jacob and Adrian’s new book The Definitive Guide to Django, has been updated to reflect the final copy used in the print edition (published by Apress — you can get it from Amazon). I’ve just received my print edition and it looks really, really great, so far. Congrats, guys. Visit site »
Congrats to Jacob Kaplan-Moss and Adrian Holovaty, who have finished writing on The Django Book, their forthcoming Apress title. It will be the definitive guide to web programming using everyone’s favorite rapid web application development framework. Of course, you can get almost all of it online, for free. Visit site »
Adrian notes that Django, as a publicly available open source project, is two years old today. He points out several of the differences in Django between then and now, showing just how far we’ve come. But, as he notes, it’s even more amazing — even with all the changes — that the basic design of the framework has remained the same.
I continually amazed at how often I see references to Django being “new” in blog posts and articles. Django is not new. Django has not only been publicly available for two full years, but has been in use on production sites with relatively high traffic for at least a year (maybe more?) before that. Django may only recently be getting a lot of attention within the wider web development community, but it’s been around and the Python community has been well-aware of it for at least three years now. Visit site »
Adrian Holovaty’s sort-of “template language turned inside-out.” Basically, you feed it a series of web pages created from the same template, and it returns the template. Then, you can use that template to scrape data from other pages. Hard to explain, but seems really damn useful for those folks who spend a lot of time scraping data off the web. I had to read the example code like three times before it made sense, but when it did — sweet. Visit site »
I’m really excited about Adrian’s new project. It’s a great idea, and it really will be interesting to see how the open source part of it goes. Here’s wishing him and his team all the best! Visit site »
Adrian on his big grant, and what he’ll be doing with it. The project is called EveryBlock, and he will be leaving The Washington Post in order to make it happen. Awesome news. Congrats, Adrian! Visit site »
Django creator and web-based journalist Adrian Holovaty won a $1.1 million grant to “create, test and release open-source software that links databases to allow citizens of a large city to learn (and act on) civic information about their neighborhood or block.” If you’ve seen Adrian’s chicagocrime.org, you know the power of this sort of thing. I expect great things. Congrats, Adrian! Visit site »
If you’re going to the Web 2.0 conference in SF next week, be sure to check out Adrian’s presentation about Django. You know you want to! Also, there’s a comparison of web app frameworks panel that looks like it should be good (includes members of both the Rails and Django teams). Visit site »
This quick O’Reilly blog post notes a very important point: people are looking for cookie-cutter solutions to the CMS problem. Adrian Holovaty wants to set them straight; you need a CMS for your data, and that can’t be provided by an off-the-shelf CMS.
People often ask me, for example, if they can use the code for my personal CMS. They’re missing the point. The personal CMS I’ve written is very much tailored to me — it wouldn’t be very useful to you. You need one tailored to you, just like I need one tailored to me. The same holds true for professional-level CMSes. Our Ellington CMS works well as a news publishing platform because it’s uniquely tailored to what news organizations do and the kind of data they deal with. It wouldn’t be very efficient, say, for powering a personal website. Cookie-cutter solutions just don’t work very well in most cases.
Luckily, Django makes it very easy for you to “roll your own”. :) Visit site »
Programmers: here’s your chance to work with one of the leading innovators in the online news world. Visit site »
A nice piece on PBS.com about the fact that some newspapers are getting hip to the fact that they need web programmers. I wish more of them would start getting with the idea of having great web designers, too.
Quotes from Adrian Holovaty and Jacob Kaplan-Moss included. Visit site »