Lonely Lion

Guido followed up.

It’s great to see this sort of thing happening. Although there’s a vibrant not-web community surrounding Python, my bread and butter is web, so any effort on Guido’s part to push the direction of Python on the web is a +1 in my book.

It’s also interesting to see him full on support WSGI. I admit to being way behind the curve on a) really “getting” WSGI and b) using WSGI, despite the fact that paster seems to be doing a good amount of heavy lifting. Stuff I’ve seen Ian doing has been really interesting, and clearly points to a possible future in which the Python driven web is pretty slick.

In the meantime, I’ve spent a good amount of time with Rails, working on Tastebud and have been really satisfied with the results. I’m excited to start picking apart UF and adapting it to Pylons I still haven’t thrown a solid Django app just yet. At this point, I don’t have anything in mind. I am committed to building something outward facing with Django sooner than later. We shall see.

On a unrelated note, I opened an account at Textdrive over the weekend. I plan on moving Tastebud and Lonely Lion there in the next couple of days. I recently downgraded my Speakeasy account, and keep stressing out my connection.

Guido is talking about web frameworks. It’ll be interesting to watch the fallout from this one. There’s a lot of development in the Python web framework domain as of late, I’m glad to see the guy at the top starting to shine his big scary Sauron eye on the topic.

Chicago Bloggers added a ping service recently. Neat. I need to add Tastebud in there as well.

In an age of endless betas, this is very exciting news. Congratulations Mike! Myghty is a big boy now.

I messed around with Tastebud quite a bit yesterday, factoring out some redundant backend code, and adding pictures to the frontend. Although Rails allows for picture uploading pretty much out of the box, I thought it would be clever to host the pictures on flickr and use it as a potential driver of traffic. It ended up being more difficult than I initially thought. I powered through, and finished up last night.

There’s a handful of things I want to change about the site. I’ve decided to put a freeze on any more technical changes, shift gears, and work on content for a while. We have a stack of index cards waiting to be entered from 2005.

Jason mentioned trying to start up a Tastebud: Milwaukee (he just moved up there) that would be pretty cool.

Google has already started to drive a fair amount of “Fromager Affinois” traffic to the site. Who knew so many people were Googling for artisan cheese. We’re also getting a lot of hits from France, which is disconcerting. We’re pretty much creating content off the cuff here, with not much of a background in actual food criticism. The site is really about us trying to learn how to describe what we like about something. French criticism of our criticism of French food is terrifying. The French are intimidating.

However, French intimidation and Wisconsin Cheeseheads aside, Camri and I need to dig our heels in and start producing content.

The S&R AV squad put the video from the Snakes and Rubies shoot out online: http://www.djangoproject.com/snakesandrubies/

I haven’t watched it yet. When you download, please use the torrent links to help save bandwidth.

Ian on getting hung up. What a great article. I’m kind of behind the curve on blog-reading, as I avoided it while I was on vacation, so I just now read that piece. I like it. Very much. Not so much because I don’t like Rails (I do like Rails, a lot) but because I don’t like the end-all-be-all of anything.

Change, said the little monk with the robe, is the only thing you can rely on. I’m happy to be learning new things (Rails) just like I’m going to be happy to learn Turbogears and Pylons this week. Just like I’ll be happy to learn fancy-new-thing-that-appears-in-Q306.

Keep on keepin’ on you terrific web makers. Rails represents a pretty significant change in the web landscape, both technically and in how to market an open source project. Learn from it, use it, but don’t let it (or anything) become an anchor. If you close yourself off to new things, you’ll miss out.

Camri and I have been working on a tasting weblog for the past couple of weeks. We’re officially opening it to the outside world today.

The site is called Tastebud. For the past year or so we’ve been taking notes on wines, cheeses, coffees, and teas that we like. We kept our notes on index cards, which was fine for a while, but eventually we decided what we were doing would make a good website.

This also marks my first complete project written in Ruby on Rails. I think the site took us about 40 hours total, including design. I’m pretty impressed with Rails, it’s easy to use, and does present the MVC style of web app development in a good way.

I think working through the Rails book was a valuable experience. Although I think I understood the MVC pattern before working with Rails, I’d never really implemented it on such a large scale. Regardless of whether or not I choose Rails as my framework of choice (it’s at the top of the heap) I’m completely sold on MVC as a style. I can’t imagine going back to a page by page style of development for projects I’m in control of.