Via BoingBoing, I came across quite a good article on information architecture and user experience design for social websites. If you’re at all interested in the area, I recommend it. There’s also a related wiki that seems to have a great deal of content on it.
At the start of the year I laid out some goals for 2009, and it’s time to review how they’re going.
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Last week I posted about my setup for going from reStructuredText to WordPress. It involved a shell script, some Python scripts, and the pbpaste and pbcopy commands. It worked, but it was a little on the convoluted side.
Now I have a slightly better process, and one that I will have used to publish this post.
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thesixtyone is a music site unlike any other I’ve seen. I first heard about it from AlecF’s tweet in June, but only glanced at it then. This week, I was in the mood for finding some new music, and remembered it.
It’s a site where you can browse music, except that it encourages you to try out various discovery methods by giving you “quests” and assigning points to you based on your achievements.
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While scripting my reStructuredText to WordPress workflow, I ran into a bunch of character encoding problems.
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I wrote about moving my writing over to reStructuredText on Sunday, and since then I’ve moved both my morning pages and my blog writing to it. The latter proved more complicated, primarily because I wanted to make the process almost as easy as writing pseudo-HTML (which is more or less WordPress’ native format, and kind of mine, too, for the last several years). With some hacky wrangling, I’ve managed to set that up.
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A couple of years ago I plugged star-light, a syntax highlighter that’s entirely client-side. I’ve been happy with it, but wanted a Python mode for it. I was going to post some other code this evening, and then decided that I should just make the Python mode myself.
This led to fun with regular expressions.
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I did some work on the PyWebSF site, so that it looks rather better than it did with the default WordPress theme. I altered a pretty good WordPress theme called Arras Theme, which I was fairly impressed with. As a reminder, the first meeting is tonight.
Today I upgraded this blog to WordPress 2.8, a relatively smooth process. I ran into completely unrelated problems (hitting the process limit for my shell account) that derailed things for a while, but the WordPress upgrade itself was smooth.
I use Subversion to upgrade, first using
svn export --force http://core.svn.wordpress.org/tags/2.8/ .
in my development environment, seeing if things look okay there, then checking in the 2.8 changes to my own repository (the only niggly part because I neglected to clean the dev environment of changes before the export, so I had to look through things to see what was part of the upgrade), backing up my live database, and then checking the changes out to the live environment. It all looks fine, and hopefully will continue to function normally.
I’ve been using Pylons (and, more recently, the Pylons-based TurboGears 2.0) for various projects for a while, and a few weeks ago ran into an annoying and specific problem: using Pylons via Apache made Pylons occasionally think it was running on a different port.
There’s a relatively easy answer to this, but until I was reading through TurboGears documentation, I didn’t find it.
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My brother is organizing what will hopefully become a regular web-centric Python meeting. The first meeting is planned for 18:00 Tue 23 Jun 2009 at the SF Public Library. I think a couple of speakers are lined up already, although I don’t have details on the talks. I’ll be there, and if you’re a Python developer with web interests, or a web developer into or curious about Python, you should attend too!
While randomly looking over one of my older posts last night, I realized that the YouTube video that it was centered around had been removed, making it pointless. This is extremely annoying, not just for me but for any reader of that post.
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While I’m familiar with a lot of them, I’d never actually read Yahoo!’s performance recommendations. They’re clearly laid out, with lots of good information in there. I should have a look at changing some of my own stuff into CSS sprites, as well as some of the other suggestions—these rules make a difference to users even on sites like mine.
Except for those of you who read all this via RSS, of course.
Mozilla Labs recently introduced Bespin, a browser-based fully-featured text editor. I have mixed feelings about this, because I wonder if the time would be better spent working on other things (or improving other editors), but on the other hand I like the idea of a text editor written using languages that web developers can tweak, and being in the browser offers a tremendously rich framework for layout and presentation. I also wonder if it might lead to the kind of semantic “word processing” tool I’ve previously mentioned looking for.
One of the first things I did with my resuscitated blog was to figure out how I could develop for it in a reasonable fashion.
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I’ve wrangled my old plugins and custom code so that it mostly works, except for one or two features (such as “related posts” based on tags) that I’ll revive later. Good enough for now, so I’m making the DNS changes and going ahead.
If you’re seeing this text, you’re on the new server, and all should be well. But if you don’t see another post after this one by about Friday, it suggests RSS problems, so please drop me a line.
I continued working on the blog move today, and most of the tricky database-related steps are done.
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I spent time today working on moving this blog to a new home, while also combining the articles from the old (real) blog and from this temporary one, and upgrading my version of WordPress in the process.
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I really like this jQuery sparklines plugin. I’m not sure what uses I can find for it right now, but my books/week or books/month reading rate, something like lines of code written or changed per day, the page counts of recent books, or recent MTG results would all work with it. Some of those things would be better expressed with full-size graphs using Flot, though. But while I don’t have a use case right now, this seems like a tool worth having in the toolbox (especially since it’s free).
Happy New Year!
That’s goals for the year 2009, not two thousand and nine goals, people.
I tend to start the year with a bunch of ambitions and projects—many of which I even accomplish. Some of them for this year follow.
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I haven’t got any graphs, despite what I said last time. I had some, but messed them up while experimenting with Flot, and in any case they weren’t quite what I wanted. However, I did solve some of the other issues I was having with my book-tracking application, and am relatively happy with the current view.
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Fun might be the wrong word.
(Also, this is long. Condensed: I’ve been using Freebase to store my reading data, I wrote an Acre app to provide a custom view, and I discovered that my data model has some shortcomings.)
I’ve been playing with Acre some more, specifically on a long-term project of mine: to store data about the books I read in some system and then create views about my reading habits. Yes, compulsive list-making combined with programming/data geekery.
Anyway, I could have used a lot of other systems, such as Delicious Library or LibraryThing or Books, to store this information, but none of them seemed to have quite what I want (and most of them are proprietary). I could have written my own, and planned to, but kept tweaking with the data model and generally wasn’t sure how I wanted to deal with it.
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