notable | aprendía

Notable links

Djang admin skin: django-grappelli (#)

This is sexy. I am going to try it out. However, I think I may end up branching it for my own use. I can’t handle how messy the media directory is. :)

Quotation Marks & Texture (#)

More of Jon Tan’s reasoning regarding his style of typography and the Web.

Good typography in running text is subtle and ambient. It enhances the text without interrupting it. It delivers meaning with clarity. In books, speech is mainly quoted in single marks. It’s a light touch. The typography removes itself from the picture being painted in our minds, and by doing so, allows it to shine. I’d like to achieve the same kind of light touch, here. I doubt my text will shine, but at least the typography will not distract you from my thorny prose.

Django Pony (#)

This. rocks.

My favorite bit is the tag line:

Magic that can’t be removed

Marking Required vs. Optional form fields (#)

On the Interaction Design Association (IxDA) discussion list, Erin Walsh:

We recently did prototype testing on several search forms with a mixture of required and optional fields. On the team we were split on the best approach, so we tried to distinct methods: one with optional spelled out, the other with those fields having a different visual indicator. Though the sample size was limited, the “Optional” won hands-down. Remarkably, some participants even commented on how much they liked that it said “optional right there”. I know our UI team was not thrilled, but it was extremely advantageous to spell it out rather than use an icon or other visual indicators.

Git: version control for designers (#)

Git — I’m loving it. This is another gem that helped clear things up for me. Particularly useful were the branching and tools sections.

Git cheat sheet (#)

Mmmm… I love cheat sheets. This and another cheat sheet helped me get a better grasp of git.

Typeface != Font (#)

An easy-to-read explanation of the history and current situation of those words. I also like Jason Santa Maria’s comment.

Improving newspapers comments (#)

Ten effective ways for a newspaper to improve the comments on its Web site. I know of several papers that need to take note. One I am thinking of has comments that are just worthless. The other because they are being to heavy-handed in how they control commenting, requiring name, zip-code, phone, etc. so that they can manual verify that you are who you say you are.

Local newspaper drops AP (#)

I’ll put my cards on the table – I’m not sure how we’re going to pull this off. While the AP’s value to us has been severely diminished over the years, it still does provide a handful of services that we haven’t been able to find elsewhere – yet.

Post Register Publisher Roger Plothow is bold in that statement, and I think correct in his prediction. I wish he was as firm one of the following sentences:

More likely, we’ll use that time to become essentially 100 percent local, which is probably where we’re headed eventually anyway.

The “likely … probably … eventually” sounds pretty week. The plan for their former AP budget could also be firmed up.

For now, the $114,000 assessment for 2009 represents the worst value for anything we purchase, since we use so little of what we’re paying for. I admit that I look at that money and think of all the other things we could do with it – add reporters, enhance our web site, maybe even give a raise or two to deserving under-paid employees.

That money could also go toward training the existing employees to gather news more effectively in photo, video, audio, and the written word, and buy the equipment for such purposes. A fair chunk of that will also need to go toward hiring intelligent Web professionals who can help get that new content to their consumers.

Post Register has certainly made a bold move, but it can pay off big-time if they do it right.

Django migration app (#)

I am not an SQL-hater. What little I know I like. But I am always nervous about doing migrations on my projects, even when I have multiple back-ups.

Anyway, “South” is an app that would help automate schema migrations in Django. I have high hopes for this.

Jason is just amazing (#)

His new site concept and varying design is awesome. This is my favorite article layout thus far. The man is phenomenal.

New PNG fix (#)

I have used many PNG hacks for IE 6. This one is appealing because of its small size and apparent ease of implementation, though I have not tried it yet.

Local virtualhost setup made easy (#)

A nifty script that automates the setup of VirtualHosts on your Unix machine. As with any automation script it makes some assumptions about how you should have everything organized, namely any time you want to run a site you have the files in the ~/Sites directory.

Also, I wanted to use it to setup Django testing sites, not just a generic site. So I made few modifications to the script that so it would setup the site to use mod_wsgi.

The creator has more information at his Web site, patrickgibson.com.

Plainview, a sexy presentation browser (#)

I love this kind of software: do one thing, and do it beautifully and effectively. There are many times that I would love to have had Plainview in the past.

This is 1.0 software but there are actually very few features that I want added. They would include:

Keyboard shortcuts for everything: this is possible because there are so few commands (intentionally) and is important because the mouse can be distracting. When giving a presentation I want to be able to do everything possible with the keyboard.
Ability to turn off plugins and JavaScript: in giving a presentation I often want to demonstrate how the site functions with and without these features.

5 Principles And Ideas Of Setting Type On The Web (#)

Some Web-type guidance from Smashing Magazine. I like that this article is much shorter than most of theirs.