Results tagged “django” from journal

It's a new year and time to roll out a new site over at http://gregnewman.org. This is something I've been trying to get done for a long time now and just haven't been able to find the time or inspiration to get it done. I even failed at sitesprint twice in this endeavor.

Then came along Anton Peck with this bright idea to do a post per week for a year, hence Project 52. I couldn't resist. It's a doable goal in my opinion and apparently over 500 other people think so too.

hello!newman

One of the things I have wanted to do was write and post more of my personal artwork. I haven't done it in the past for many reasons but one that stands out for me is the fact that I didn't want to flood the developers with art and didn't want to flood the artists with code. So I wrote this engine dubbed `hello!newman` using Django to help segregate the content a little better and each journal has it's own feeds. hello!newman is up on github and will be an ongoing project for me as this site evolves. Please feel free to comment here or create a ticket on github if you find any issues. If you're using IE6 and you find an issue... bite me. I don't care.

So far, I'm pleased with the direction I'm going with the design. While I have a few details to work out and some more features to add it will serve its purpose nicely.

20seven.org

For those who don't already know me, I've been blogging at 20seven.org for many years and I decided it's time to archive that domain and go with a little personal branding. It's too much work to get all that data into a fresh app and do all the redirects so I'm archiving it. If you are subscribed to the feed over at 20seven.org, please update your feeds to the new site (below).

Feeds

• Combined Feed
• Art Feed
• Code Feed
• Photography Feed

The beginning of August, following my relocation to Charlotte, will kick off the Personal Site Sprint along with my friends Chris Harrison and Bryan Veloso. The sprint will end with a launch date of September 1st.

What this means is we will all be redesigning and documenting the process of our personal site refresh. I will be detailing the process from initial pencil sketches all the way through to final launch. I might even throw in some screencasts.

I am also going to take this opportunity to leave Movable Type in favor of Django. This is something I've wanted to do for a while and haven't had the time or energy to do.

Personal projects are a PITA so I'm hoping that doing the sprint with two other great designers will keep me motivated.

I spent last weekend finishing up a logo for a super secret project I can't go into yet at the client's request. I can share the logo in the meantime.

When the client gives me the green-light I'll come back and update the post with a link to the project.

I've been using Basecamp for years and have a love/hate relationship with it simply because it costs me money for clients that don't want to use it. However, I can't get rid of it because there are a few clients I have that need collaboration for designs. For coding projects I use various ticketing systems from Trac to Sifter and I won't get into that in this post.

During a current project Trac is being used for the backend parts but it falls apart on design collaboration. After a few late nights I'm thrilled with the progress of Django-Loupe for design collab.

I finally got some time to work on my backlog of logos this week and they are starting to hit the streets. So if you're waiting on me to finish the commissioned logos, they are coming quickly! Sorry for delays, it's been hell-busy here.

First out the door is the new djangodose logo for they great guys of TWiD fame Eric Florenzano, Brian Rosner and Kevin Fricovsky. I believe they have announced they are recording this Sunday for those (including myself) who are anxious for the new show. I'm still working on the site design which will be finished just in time for the show release.

I took a break from Emacs this weekend to give the new version of BBEdit a spin. The first thing I noticed was that it doesn't have snippets (clippings are the accurate term) for Django. Personally, I use yasnippet in Emacs so I took an hour and converted the library I use to clippings for BBEdit in the hopes someone finds them useful.

Those of you who follow my good friend James Tauber on twitter, facebook or through the Pinax Project have already heard that James has resigned from mValent.

Since Paul Bissex announced the api for Django-powered dpaste.com last week I've had it's been on my todo list to make a emacs mode for posting pasties.

First of all, Happy Thanksgiving to everyone. I hope you're enjoying food, family and football, I know I am. I'm also enjoying my new emacs minor-mode developed by Chris Wanstrath, aka defunkt.

On the heels of PDF Generation with Pisa in Django I've had the need to pull from a library of pdfs and concatenate based on user selection. At first there seemed to be no good solutions but research and a recommendation by James Tauber (thanks James) turned up pdftk (the pdf toolkit).

Today I had to come up with pdf generation for a project and was happy to find Pisa makes this cake-work. Pisa depends on Reportlab but you don't have to dig into Reportlab to get your pdf generated.

A couple days ago Brian Rosner posted a great article on Reusable App Conventions. If you haven't read it yet it's worth a read or two. I have a few in the works and want to quickly discuss sandboxing your development process for reusables using Pinax.

In a chat with James Tauber he mentioned he needed a cachebuster and for a few projects including Pinax I need to ensure my css and javascript edits are not being cached in the browser. This is a standard feature in Rails but not in Django so I whipped up a simple setup of tag helpers to do the trick.

For the past four or five months I've been helping out and contributing to the Pinax project which is gaining popularity and buzz very quickly. If you're not up to speed on what Pinax is, the best and most amusing way is to watch the video of James Tauber's talk at Djangocon or simply dive in and get your social network up and running.

After the launch of Cloud27 and Djangocon, there has been much more activity surrounding Pinax and a few questions about deployment. While the documentation is being worked on, I figured I would write up some general principals on the deployment of your project.

Eric Holscher put up a nice screencast Saturday on using the excellent django command extensions. I've used it before but wasn't aware of all the nice features the guys had built into it so I needed to get my Mac up to speed with graphviz. Fine and dandy but pygraphviz didn't play nicely with the graphviz images available, so I needed to build it.