Fast and Beautiful URLs with Django
You'll notice (for the moment, at least), that the URL of this blog post is made up of a pretty easy to read components. There's the domain, the /blog/ route, and then the post's slug, the lowercase title with dashes. It tells the server to use the blog URL configuration, and then to look up a blog post whose slug matches the following text. You could use something like blog.asp?post=12 (if you were running ASP... ahem) and the script you're running there will pull up the blog post with row ID 12. It works, but it's ugly and not terribly user friendly. Hence the 'beautiful' URLs you see here, courtesy of Django.
Why would you want to change this then? How about performance gains?
Read on >>Upcoming Workshop: Writing for the Web
Wellfire goes to the Netherlands! This April, Wellfire's Erin Lancione will be co-teaching a workshop on writing for the Web for the European Institute of Public Administration.
Read on >>Ubuntu's new Mac-like controls are a small marketing win
Ubuntu 10.04, Lucid Lynx (we were hoping for Lusty Lemur, but hey), will be out of beta and ready for prime time soon. A lot of the early chatter was about the interface updates, including logo and color scheme changes, and Ubuntu's decision to move window controls (e.g. close, minimize) from the top right to the top left.
Basically, they've transitioned the controls from Windows-style to Mac OS-style.
Read on >>Tumblr ups the ante on Wordpress
Tumblr recently release a new standard module to its suite of micro-blog tools, the Page module. Tumblr is already a great user-friendly service for blogging, for even the most inexperienced technophobe. Having the ability to create static pages within your Tumblr site is a huge step forward towards gaining more marketshare. Having created Frankenstein Tumblr sites with static content before, its great to see Tumblr listening to their userbase and its needs. So, lets take a look at what the Pages module has to offer.
Read on >>How Can Megacorp Copy Twitter?
In this blog post I'll summarize and respond to a tech article about web services in the enterprise; explain the root culprit for enterprise organizations' lag behind start-ups; and place the lesson a context meaningful for even small business websites.
I guess I'm behind in my tech reading. A friend of mine recently shared an article from ZDNet by Dion Hinchcliffe - actually published this past summer - about modeling enterprise web services after web start-ups. That is, redesigning enterprise SOA after web start-up APIs.
Read on >>Virgin America goes Flash-less
Virgin America, aviation child of billionaire marketing genius Richard Branson, relaunched its website this week. And it ditched Flash.
As reported in The Register yesterday:
It illustrates the options customers have between picking the closed Flash - or Silverlight from Microsoft - and open technologies such as HTML to serve content to a new generation of mobile computing devices.
Virgin picked HTML to give users of iPhones and other mobiles the option in the future of checking in through their phone. The battle between Adobe and Apple has seen Flash deliberately excluded from the Jesus Phone.
Read on >>
Six scams that accomplished amazing things
Ain't linkbait grand?
8 outrageous frauds involving the CIA
Why social media should scare you more than Osama Bin Laden
8 ways the 2010 Olympics can help you survive a plane crash
Need more B.S. blog titles? These and more, courtesy of the Linkbait Generator. Happy Friday.
Read on >>Content migration: archival sites
Maintaining the old content in a parallel home is not an ideal solution. There's usually a reason you moved to a new system, new design, new information architecture. Keeping the old stuff online as-is and on a subdomain requires server resources, can create confusion for your readers or customers, and in general is a pain-in-the-ass albatross 'round the neck.
Yet if your old content is distributed across thousands of files in an onion of different systems, you may find it more important to make the content available than to maintain system purity while losing reader content. This is especially true if it includes plain HTML files (non-CMS controlled) or resource files like images and PDF files. Are you really going to extract all of that content from thousands of files in dozens or hundreds of folders? Not likely.