Antonio Rodriguez, founder and CEO of Django-powered Tabblo.com (now part of HP), has moved his personal site over to Django and has a nice write up about switching to it from Typo.
The thing about Typo was that it was hard to make any changes to it without having some of that RoR “magic” explode in my face. With the Django there is no magic— just clean, explicit, and simple design.
Indeed.
Another day, another Django app that implements a bunch of features I’ve already wasted hours upon hours writing for myself.
Seriously, this is awesome. James Bennett has written an app that adds a whole bunch of useful features onto the built-in Django comments app, including Akismet spam filtration, auto-moderation based on age of the associated object, etc. Really cool stuff. Visit site »
Via Tim Baxter, Joe Hewitt has created a very clever way to use Firebug to debug your iPhone apps. Smart! Visit site »
I don’t have a big problem with this as long as the iPhone’s battery works reasonably well throughout the duration of the contract (two years). Because of the contract, I basically expect to have my iPhone two years, and I expect the battery to work that long. if it does not, I’ll be annoyed. Visit site »
“Dear Adobe — Acrobat (Reader) sucks gigantic mountain-goat testicles.” Kinda hard to argue with that. Visit site »
Jeremy has a nice review of Pownce, the new Django-powered social tool for “sharing stuff with your friends” by Leah Culver, Kevin Rose, Daniel Burka, and ShawnAllen Visit site »
Zeldman, after going through some of the survey results from ALA, has noticed that very few companies have web divisions. Instead, most web sites are built out of either the IT or marketing departments — or by ad hoc groups made up of people from all over the company. He suggests this is a bad practice, and that instead, companies should have web divisions. I couldn’t agree more.
We talked about this a lot when I worked at K-State. The University Relations group (i.e. marketing) didn’t have the technical skills necessary to put together a good website. And even though they were good designers, they largely didn’t understand the ins and outs of designing for the web. I worked in the IT department, which technically had ownership of the website. The administration didn’t consider us to be designers (and to be fair, most of the group wasn’t). So, when a redesign was proposed, they built and ad hoc group (which, admittedly, was better than just having one group or the other do it). The results were okay, but I can’t help but think it could have been far, far better with a dedicated team of web professionals.
In contrast, The World Company (parent of The Lawrence Journal-World and a whole gaggle of other news media properties) built a web division (World Online) to handle its online properties, and the results were numerous awards, respect across the industry, and generally well-received sites.
I would assert that a dedicated web division has more hiring power than either an IT or marketing group, as well. I know I wouldn’t go to work again for an IT department — but I’d definitely go to an internal web team for a great media property or brand.
So, yes: let there we web divisions. Visit site »