A solid, well-rounded list that includes a ton of great bloggers and a handful of good friends. Via Rex, who is just a bit uptight about people not giving him credit for the links they steal from his site — even though he no doubt stole them from somewhere else. (Just teasing, buddy.) Visit site »
Zledman talks about the changing personal site, which is more and more being “offloaded” to third-party services (Flickr, Twitter, Tumblr, etc.). I like to think I’ve got the best of both worlds, here at jeffcroft.com. I definitely do miss the old school personal site, though — I talked about this with Paul Boag on a forthcoming episode of Boagword. Visit site »
Sarah gripes about people that pipe their blog posts into twitter or their tweets into their blog feeds. I couldn’t agree more. It’s incredibly annoying. Visit site »
People ask me this question all the time. The answer, in general, is, “there’s really not one.” Building a monolithic blogging application for Django kind of goes against the grain of most of the best practices for Django development — and James explains this in detail. It’s a good read if you’re curious about the design of Django apps.
What’s more, most of the Django blogging applications that do exist were generally built by a single person for their own personal site, and tend to be customized to that person’s needs, making them less likely to be suitable for your needs.
And, quite frankly, writing a simple blogging app in Django is so damn easy that it just doesn’t feel worth it. Visit site »
Speaking form personal experience, I can say that I fully agree with this piece. Blogs engines are great learning tools: everyone understands what one is and how it typically works, everyone has their own ideas of “custom” things they want from their blog engine, and the basic logic involved is not particularly complicated. Visit site »
Definitely funny — at least if you’ve ever tried to read Digg.com comments. Visit site »
Jeremy has some great thoughts here on the nature of online conversation. Based in part on a back-and-forth he and I had over the weekend, I was feeling similarly depressed about the ability for people to communicate as civil human beings for the past couple of days. Besides that exchange, I managed to (seemingly) offend Eric Meyer and Christian Montoya, and I had to read this incredibly depressing post and its subsequent comment thread. I was quite down for a while there— so much so that Michelle noticed and I ended up venting to her about it.
While I generally don’t agree with Jeremy’s belief that comments on blogs are a bad idea, over the weekend I knew exactly what he was talking about. I think the best piece I’ve ever read on on this topic is Wilson’s Shouts and Echos.
I don’t have much positive to say on the matter — I just hope it stops, at some point. Visit site »
I’m so excited to see Christian’s Typogrify being ported to all these popular publishing platform. The web is getting prettier every day! Visit site »
It’s good to see Movable Type back with a new version. It’s been soooo long since the last major update. I’m no longer using it, but it was good for me while it lasted, and the additions of memcached and OpenID support are big boons. Congrats, Six Apart. Happy to have you back in the game. Visit site »
Textplates is a TxxtPattern template design contest — and I’ll be helping with the judging this year. There are some great prizes, including a Mac mini, books from Friends of ED/Apress, and more. If you’re a designer and a TXP fan, definitely put your name in the hat! Visit site »
I actually had the exact same experience Scott describes here. I read several blog posts on the Kathy Sierra situation, unable to really make sense of exactly what had happened and who was responsible. It wasn’t until the San Francisco Chronicle (read “real journalism”) reported on the story a few days later that I was able to understand it all.
Bloggers wrote what they knew. They wrote what the understood, and what they believed. That’s great. That’s what blogging is. But it took an act of journalism to make sense of it all in one cohesive story. This is why blogging is not journalism, and never will be.
Can journalists blog? Of course. Can bloggers be journalists? Sure. But they’re two very different acts — both will be vitally important to our media landscape going forward. Visit site »
A beautiful personal expression site based around the idea of scrapbooking, with a gorgeous Flash-based UI and set of wonderfully feminine default templates by the likes of Veerle Pieters and Cindy Li (and others, too). Includes spport for pulling your photos from Flickr, and several other services.
This is what happens when people take decidedly geeky things (blogs, open APIs, wizzy Flash UIs, and so forth) and mash them up with things real (as in non-geeky) people want. Congrats to everyone involved with this — it looks like a really, really impressive web application.
Sidenote: between this and Picnik, the Flash developers are kind of kicking our ass on the web app front. Where are the web standards-based apps that work this well?
Sidenote #2: Anyone know what backend technologies are used in Scrapblog? Visit site »
Jeremy picks up on Richard’s machine tag ideas (which I linked yesterday) and implements them on his blog. I should do this too — it would fit nicely with the other Flickr API stuff I’ve been doing. Visit site »
Please help the WordPress guys get the word out. This is really unfortunate. I feel bad for Matt and company. Visit site »
Jason Lynes is perturbed at Inman’s Mint 2 marketing machine. Which is, of course, amusing, since a bunch of people were perturbed about the same thing on upon Mint’s initial release. People will never believe it, I’m sure, but Shaun did the same thing anyone would do if they were releasing an app: he asked his friends to beta test it for him. There was nothing more to the agreement. Us beta testers were never promised a free anything, and were never asked to publicly rave, defend, or link to the product or its author. Some of us did so, because we like it, but certainly not because Shaun asked. Jason Lynes generally seems like a good guy and is a talented designer, but this post is nothing but a bunch of sour grapes (and, frankly, it’s not the first post of his that’s come off that way). Visit site »
The Times’ David Carr on blogging from the perspective of a traditional journalist. Good stuff. Visit site »
Funny — I know all five of them. Visit site »
I really like this idea. For the most part, the implementation seems sound. I think I’ll be whipping up some Django code to implement it here. So if you comment on this site, make yourself a Pavatar. :) Via Matt. Visit site »
I’ve noticed several bloggers recently jumped the WordPress ship to try out Habari, a new blogging platform built on PHP5 using more modern programming concepts (read: object-oriented) and giving you more flexibility in databases (read: PostgreSQL support). Good to hear this is out there, because frankly, most of the existing crop of blogging tools (MT, WordPress, etc.) are not “modern” in any sense of the word. Habari isn’t for me (I’m too hooked on Python now), but it may be worth looking into if you want a nice PHP-based blogging platform. Visit site »
Simon has a great piece on how to turn your blog into an open ID. I definitely intend to do this. Thanks, Simon! Visit site »
“But there are also the stories which can’t be told because they seem too trivial and therefore they don’t meet the rather rigid newspaper standard for what is news. The truth is those are the stories people are really interested in, so why shouldn’t those conversations be reflected in a publication?” Visit site »
Sort-of related to the discussion Jason Lynes is having about whether or not comments are useful and the “Django comment robots” on this site, Roger has a great list of comment posting guidelines. No doubt, if everyone followed these, the world would be a better place. Visit site »
John Allsop says: “I … think a different use pattern will emerge, one less focussed vertically on blogs and bloggers, but more horizontally on individual posts.” I think this is probably accurate. Good read. Visit site »
“Let me emphasize that no one — including adults— should have a blog or personal website. … Blogging has become a socially accepted practice — just as are dating seriously too young, underage drinking and general misbehaving. But just because someone else “jumps off the cliff” does not mean you should do the same.” That’s right, folks. blogging is just as evil as underage drinking! I had no idea — did you? Visit site »
Greg isn’t so excited about “blaghs” anymore. I’m kind of with him. I enjoy the content of blogs and the commentary they provide — but I’m very sick of the cookie-cutter-ness of them, especially from a design perspective. I, too, miss the old days when hitting a new personal site meant a completely different experience than the last one. Visit site »
Working in the online news media industry, I got into a lot of conversations about content management. Turns out it’s a tricky problem to solve. There are a lot ...
James Bennett has a great entry about how to extend Django’s FreeComment functionality with this like comment moderation, auto-moderation after 30 days, and Askimet-based spam-checking. A must-read for any Django weblogger. Visit site »
My friends Josh Works and Jessa Talamentez preview their new travel-blogging site, which will let you sign up and create “wanderlogues” of your travels — including Flickr photos, journal entries, geocoding information with maps, and more. It looks really great. Definitely check it out. Django-powered, of course! Visit site »
Ross is a longtime member of the Django community and wrote a tutorial on how to put together a blog in Django way back when. Now, he’s updated his blog code for the latest version of Django and made it available for download. A great learning tool. Total lines of code for Ross’ Django blog? 63. Visit site »
Similar to the one I just linked, this blog-based mashup is an online art piece by Jonathan Harris exploring love, hate, and desire. Awesome. Visit site »