I haven’t received a great deal of specific feedback on toppcloud (update: renamed Silver Lining), only a few people (Ben Bangert, Jorge Vargas) seem to have really dived deeply into it. But — and this is not unexpected — I have already gotten several requests about making it more agnostic with …
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Leaving TOPP
After three and a half years at The Open Planning Project, my time there is done.
For a while TOPP has been trying to find itself, to determine what it is that it can do best, and how to do that. I think TOPP has finally started really figuring that …
Weave: valuable client-side data
I’ve been looking at Weave some lately. The large-print summary on the page is Synchronize Your Firefox Experience Across Desktop and Mobile. Straight forward enough.
Years and years ago I stopped really using bookmarks. You lose them moving from machine to machine (which Weave could help), but mostly I …
toppcloud (Silver Lining) and Django
I wrote up instructions on using toppcloud (update: renamed Silver Lining) with Django. They are up on the site (where they will be updated in the future), but I’ll drop them here too…
Creating a Layout
First thing you have to do (after installing toppcloud of course) is create …
A new way to deploy web applications
Deployment is one of the things I like least about development, and yet without deployment the development doesn’t really matter.
I’ve tried a few things (e.g. fassembler), built a few things (virtualenv, pip), but deployment just sucked less as a result. Then I got excited about App …
Toward a new self-definition for open source
I’ve been programming Python web software for quite a while now. I considered coming here and talked about WSGI, standards, cross-framework integration, etc., but I decided I wanted to come up here and talk to you as compatriots, as fellow open source programmers.
Over the past year or so …
WebOb decorator
Lately I’ve been writing a few applications (e.g., PickyWiki and a revisiting a request-tracking application VaingloriousEye), and I usually use no framework at all. Pylons would be a natural choice, but given that I am comfortable with all the components, I find myself inclined to assemble the pieces …
Treating configuration values as templates
A while back I described fassembler and one of the things I liked in it is how the configuration works. It uses a conventional declarative INI-style but also allows arbitrary code, so that defaults can be based on each other.
Here’s a basic example of a default configuration …
Woonerf and Python
At TOPP there’s a lot of traffic discussion, since a substantial portion of the organization is dedicated to Livable Streets initiatives. One of the traffic ideas people have gotten excited about is Woonerf. This is a Dutch traffic planning idea. In areas where there’s the intersection of lots …
Cultural Imperialism, Technology, and OLPC
A couple posts have got me thinking about cultural imperialism lately: a post by Guido van Rossum about “missionaries” and OLPC not about OLPC at all, a post by Chris Hardie and a speech by Wade Davis.
Some of the questions raised: are we destroying cultures? If so, what can …