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August 31, 2006

Isotoma in the Yorkshire Post

Ah, fame at last.

You learn something new every day

And today's lesson was... basestring. The base class for str and unicode. Can be used with isinstance to test if you either str or unicode, rather than hacking around. It was definitely news to me, anyway...

August 22, 2006

Edward Tufte

Edward Tufte is in many ways the darling of Web2.0. First coming into prominence a couple of years ago when his concept of 'sparklines' 1, 2 starting doing the rounds of the tech blogs, his manifesto for clean design and clear display of information has essentially become accepted truth. If you've not heard of him there is a fascinating intro over at NPR which will, like as not, lead you to seek out some of his books. We've got Visual Explanations here and it has been inspirational in times of IA doubt.

August 17, 2006

Rare HTML Elements

I knew about (and use) most of these HTML elements, but I’d never seen optgroup before. Very handy.

August 16, 2006

New customer site goes live

We've been working with La Luz Property for a while on getting their new site up and running in Plone. Today it went live. The requirement was to provide a proper content management system to replace the static site that they had been managing in Front Page for the last few years, but not to break their current corporate identity. As always, Plone came to the rescue. The ability to skin it pretty much how you like combined with the flexibility of Archetypes meant that we could deliver an Enterprise level content management system with the right look and feel for a fraction of the cost of a more traditional system.

August 04, 2006

Our first Plone 2.5 Site

We’ve just launched our first Plone 2.5 site for Gentleman’s Relish Amateur Cricket Club, and rather nice it is too. Admittedly we have put zero effort into skinning it - but it hardly needs it really.

August 02, 2006

Kernighan strikes again

A great quote. spotted by Richard Jones:

“Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it.” — Brian Kernighan

August 01, 2006

Data Structures as Culture

An interesting post, pointed out by Yoz Grahame. There probably is something in this, oddly - there really is a cultural value to architectural decisions, just as with all decisions people make in organisations I guess - people don’t only make decisions with regard to what is right for this project, but they also try to make decisions that are defensible within the structures of their organisation.