jmoiron.net

After some false starts, I've finally got a new design to a point where I think it's probably fit for the public. I've been very, very busy on a bunch of projects recently, but have a few technical blog posts and a python library release hopefully coming up soon.

Spent a little time with "Syntactically Awesome StyleSheets" tonight (sass). I wrote up a preliminary new design for this blog, and used all of the features in the sass tutorial. My impressions as I went through this process:

I've been waiting a long time to write about this. Johnny Cache is now released upon the world. It's a drop-in caching library/framework for Django that will cache all of your querysets forever in a consistent and safe manner. You can install it via pip install johnny-cache.

Django 1.0 has some nice new features and some better ways of doing things we used to do manually. The admin app getting decoupled from the ORM has really paved the way for a lot of customization to go into the admin app; so much so that the last 10% it used to be missing for most CMS needs is now probably easily realized via small decoupled customizations.

From some talks with Greg Deangelis, who seems to have taken Jeremy's design aesthetic to heart, I have decided that I should fix this broken site. Fixing it means a lot of things:

Editors Note: This entry was published late due to laziness and technical difficulties, and first appeared here on September 7th, 2008.

You might have noticed that the site has seen a few minor changes. This reflects a large-scale refactoring of the entire blog application (in order to fix a queryset caching issue), and the simplification and consolidation of a lot of crufty templates. You can see my progress via the hg repo.

After a few days of actually getting things done, I relapsed into staring lazily into the depths of the internet and finding entertainment in what most people would probably consider the most mundane of places. This time, it was one of the rare interesting reddit articles in which a guy mails typographers asking them for handwriting samples.

I mentioned before that I had splintered off my blog developing efforts into a project I named saudade. The first somewhat releasable ball of code is now finished and in operation at jmoiron.net. This is a (thusfar modest) blog engine utilizing Django and focusing on levereging existing technologies, best practices, and a slim codebase. Some features saudade has over my previous software:

I suppose this is it. I have finally somewhat crafted a "new version" of "the site". The old comments are all safe, but I haven't migrated them over to the new system yet. I'll get around to it sometime. They're enabled again, until the spam bots attack!

For most of today I was trying my hand at developing an object oriented framwork that would result in generated code that would look as if it was handwritten. My preliminary results are pretty encouraging. The main idea comes from the the design of PHPhtmlLib, but I wasn't happy with the generated code from that library and wanted something a little more XHTML friendly.

A bunch of people I know are going to be graduating tomorrow, so congratulations and good luck to all of them. This includes Mike "Super Jew" Krupnic, Jeremy "Jerumu" Mikola and Wei Alan "Just Got Married" Tsang. Two of these guys have jobs so good luck with that, and Krupnic you might want to try searching for work in the pacific north west since you've already tried in every other region!

As many of those who would possibly care have been told personally by me, and those who quite possibly do not care have been notified in my latest journal post, theres a new site design being debugged currently. There are a few quite errors that I still have to stamp out; errors caused by either laziness, bad style, bad structure, or just quirky behavior. I'll need help testing this on other browsers since my system currently only has Links and Firefox 0.8.

Why is everyones little website backend called ".X"? I'm getting annoyed of the high five being paid to Microsoft on this one, and I for one am tired of it. .Deus is no more, I'm renaming whatever it is I did to Deus 2003. Lets see Microsoft do that.

Mozilla for linux, ah how you've betrayed me.

This is the first new layout since early august; so I guess it hasn't been that long. This is the first layout I've put up on this page that wasn't in my mind minimalist, although jeremy seems to redefine the meeaning of the word routinely.

I've been having a hell of a time trying to get 0 pixels to render as 0 pixels in Internet explorer. I've already given up trying to get 100% to render as 100%; obviously, that's a lost cause.

Apparently, someone who might be higher on the deity scale than myself has agreed with me with this quick scrawling. I'm glad to know that the movement is catching on.

I needn't remind you of my little rivalry with one Jeremy Mikola, but I will, and i'll like it. (shoutouts to fflogam!) This tiny post is simply relating to that. I hope you have fun with the identical source code!