My first post
Well I’ve finally created a blog — although it’s not my first. Years ago I used to have a blogger blog but it’s been a long time since I’ve updated that. So I thought it was time for a new one!
I am planning on posting about three different topics. You can read or subscribe to all of them or just the topic (or tag) that you are interested in.
Coffee
Over the past couple of years my obsession about coffee has been consistently growing. I now roast at home, have my own pro-sumer machine, and I’m becoming quite fussy about what I let myself drink. Anyway, I plan on writing all sorts of nerdy coffee blog posts here.
Travelling
A couple of weeks ago I booked myself some return flights to Istanbul for October / November. I thought it was time to push myself out of my comfortable, English speaking comfort zone, and use up some annual leave :-)
A couple of friends of mine, Elly+Stu are currently living in Bulgaria, so I’m planning on hanging out with them, and then going exploring through turkey. I’m currently really excited and completely freaked. Anyway, I’m sure it’ll be grand!
Nerdy Stuff
If you haven’t already noticed, I’m a nerd. Now, I’m not talking about the nerd that Wikipedia defines, but rather somebody who enjoys activities that involve using the brain in a technical/analytical/creative way. I don’t think I could find anybody (according to my defintely) who isn’t a nerd from time to time.
Computer programmers (me included) are defintely nerds when it comes to computers, Engineers are nerds when it comes to math, coffee lovers are nerds about coffee, artists are nerds about art, builders are nerds about construction, musicians are nerds about music and perfection, and jocks are VERY BIG nerds when it comes to sport. Do I need to go on?
Anyway, in the nerdy section I hope to blog about things that I find nerdy.
Comments are closed.
Nice one dude… looking forward to some nerdy updates because I too am a nerd.
I love the picture of yourself… it looks heaps like you.
Oooh! My first ever comment – Yay
Thank man, and keep up the good posts on your blog.
Humphrey B Legend! I’m excited to have another blog to subsrice to.. particularly the coffee and travel sections.. sweet! Keep the posts pumping
Yo Humph!
Nice blog, are you using wordpress to power this?
I like the layout too, simple, clean and just easy to read.
Coffee and nerdy stuff? what else do you need on a blog! *subscribes to feeds*
Cheers man!
Na, not using wordpress. I’m using [byteflow](http://byteflow.su/) which runs on [django](http://djangoproject.com) (which is what I use at work). Wordpress is awesome, but it’s been too long since I’ve used php and the hosted version isn’t flexible enough for a nerd like me
Good luck with the album man! When you planning on releasing?
Sorry about the stupid spam bots.
It’ll stop now, as I’ve just turned off auto-approval of anonymous comments. When I get a chance, I’ll make it so u need to pass a ["human test"](http://recaptcha.net/) to post a comment.
About time you started a blog… everyone should have one (that’s not hosted by facebook !)
Can’t wait to read some coffee news.
Haha… yeah, I had a blog years ago but didn’t post much. Hopefully it’ll be different this time!
Had a quick look at yours. I like how it looks!
I like the OpenID feature, however you may like to trim the users input. I had a space at the end of my login and it didn’t like it.
Also while the login form appears as an overlay on the current page, after logging in I’m redirected back to the front page.
Hello, looks very good. I have been looking around for a Python blog engine so that I can understand what is going on when I run my blog. The situation seems like a big mess out there, with all kinds of web frameworks and awful support for blogs… Very different from the situation in Ruby… I’m almost regretting having chosen Python as my first language ! not quite yet though.
Can you post a few words about how the setup of this blog works? Or even better, can you make the code available on a Git repository ? at least I know how those work (e.g. GitHub).
Alright thanks in advance for *any* details.
PS I am hoping to have syntax highlighting in my blogs, as well as (hopefully) mathematics (e.g. Latex). Usually implementations of the latter look AWFUL.
Hi there marco!
Glad to hear that you have chosen Python – It’s a fantastic language. Well my blog is running on Byteflow which is a opensource project that uses the Django framework. I’ve been using Django at work for a couple of years now, and it’s amazing. It really streamlines and simplifies the process of creating websites. I think the reason that there aren’t many mainstream blogs out there in python/django is because it is so simple to just create your own blog engine. I think most python-django blogs are custom jobs.
I was really excited when I discovered ByteFlow… Here’s what I like about it:
* It was one of the easiest django projects to get working initially.
* It supported heaps of things.
* It supported openid etc.
* I have been using django for a while now, so if I want to change anything, it’s easy.
After using it for a while, there were a few things that I don’t like:
* After a couple of days of using it I noticed that the project hadn’t been updated in a while. I’d prefer to use a code base that has active development happening.
* It handles comments differently than I’d like. It does some weird thing with creating every commenter a user account. However, I don’t see the point of that. So I’m in the process of switching the comments over to use django.contrib.comments.
* A couple of there ajax functions don’t work if you don’t have js enabled.
When i started this blog, I was deciding between wordpress and byteflow. I chose byteflow because I’m really familiar with django/python and thought it’d be easier to do custom stuff if need be.
There wouldn’t be much use in me posting my code for this blog as I haven’t changed much from the ByteFlow Engine (So it’s pretty good then). Most of the work I’ve done is to create my own custom theme.
Python has lots of modules that you can easily install (with easy_install). Python is probably the language of choice for doing your latex equations and your syntax highlighting. I think there is a module called beautifulsoup that will do the syntax highlighting.
There are also heaps of cool mini django apps that you can just plug into your blog. django-tagging is a great example. Anyway, if you haven’t already, I’d recommend following the getting started in django tutorial… C what u think after that
Humphrey
Hey thanks for the reply, that is quite helpful. I basically narrowed it down to wordpress and byteflow, and am trying out both and following the Django tutorial.
In fact I tried out a number of Python “web frameworks” and the one which seemed the most conceptual and easy is CherryPy. Somehow it is more simple and abstracted and better for a mathematician it seems. I’m not sure yet about Django. Certainly it seems like more can be done within Django than CherryPy, which seems to be just a simple part of a framework.
Disturbingly there is also Pylons, which is supposedly conceptually more advanced than Django, who knows what that means… I wish people could just get along.
Marco
Yeah, I’m a fan of Wordpress. It’s simple to deploy and use and has a good user base (so it’s stable). If you are wanting to get up and going quick and spend most of your time writing blog content then wordpress is for you. Also, since it’s so widely used it is easy to find a good looking template on the net to use. However, it’s code base is in php (which I don’t like now that I’ve started using python). Php isn’t very well structured and it’s easy for your code to get messy.
On the other hand, byteflow isn’t used as much as wordpress, and from what I can tell, the codebase hasn’t been updated much recently. It comes with a few demo themes, but if you don’t like any of them (I didn’t) then you’ll need to create your own. Although, that’s not too hard if you know your way around html / css / js.
I think wordpress is a more stable product which is better suited for most people. However, I chose byteflow because I wanted to use python/django, and I wanted to easily do custom things if need be. It can also do mult-tag feeds which I think is a cool idea. If you want to get involved in coding your own site a bit, then I think byteflow is a great starting point. The code is easy to understand and Django is an awesome framework compared to php and others.
As for web-frameworks. I’d choose Django out of the python options. It’s got a massive user base, has recently had 1.0 and 1.1 releases. Google think it’s ok because they have based their appengine on it, or at least parts of it. I would also choose django over rails for one reason – it runs much faster out there in the wild.
Personally, I’d give both of them a go, and see what you like better. Oh, and you’ll probably be able to find cheaper hosting for wordpress. However, [webfaction](http://www.webfaction.com/?affiliate=humphreymurray) offer pretty awesome django webhosting from $8.50/month. (that’s who I’m with anyway). Also, alwaysdata offer a free 10mb plan for django hosting which is ok if you can keep your site under 10mb.