Week 1 - what happened?
I thought a bit about my blog and how blogging changed the last years. One thing I will try to bring back is a short overview what happened the whole week, what was interesting, what was new and what I did. I think this will also be a good way to rant about new projects.
Do you remember the times when you, mostly on Fridays, read link lists and other stuff people posted as weekly recap? It will not be something like this. Promise. There is also no need to bring this back. We have Twitter and other social networks. We can share this stuff in real time. Wasting the time of my readers with repeated URL spam is not something I want to do, especially since they are preserved in my Tumbler account.
Editors
I did not have much time writing code the last two weeks. Most of the time we had guests which means I could not get some hours of distraction free time. But I had some time to think about my development setup. Part of this will be a reason for another post. But what I noticed: Starting vim, after all those years, still feels like coming home. I do most of my work in Sublime Text 2 but a short mvim ~/code/drupan makes me want to add some plugins and start using it again. But sadly I always run into the same shortcomings. It is still ugly, I am looking at you NERDTree. Command-T and other plugins are still not as good as ST2s integrated solution. Those are just the two biggest problems I currently have.
I also find the lint-plugin quite useful but configuring this with vim and syntastic seems to involve the blood of a virgin, scarifying a goat and summoning some demons.
I do not need much from my editor. Syntax highlighting, sane indenting, Command-T and it should look nice. I refuse to use something that is ugly for hours and hours.
I tried ChocholatApp again. Somehow they managed to really fuck up. If I edit a CSS file and start writing a comment with /* all keystrokes are doubled and I cannot delete anything anymore. I am not sure if I run in some obscure keyboard shortcut because I am using a German layout or if there is just a bug. But looking good does not help if it is broken. And the integrated Command-T is just a joke.
Maybe I will give PeepOpen a chance and pay some $. If vim + PeepOpen work I would have nearly everything I could ask for.
PEP8
I am saying this, knowing that someone will flame me like I just killed a kitten: F* PEP8. I know why it was written, I always stuck to the rules. But I decided to break one of them. The most defended and discussed one. I will not limit my code-lines to 80 characters.
My biggest problem is that it is nearly impossible to write Django models without violating this rule. I could break lines but this just makes my code ugly. Ugly code is not the goal but it is inevitable if you write model files with an 80 character limit. Also if I write sentences that explain a command line argument e.x.. It is just a sentence and it will not make the code unreadable. But it will help making it look nicer and make scanning through the essential part faster.
catntent
What happens if you put three people in a room thinking about a name for a content management system? Right - cats in a tent. Could be a cute logo, right? And I thought playing World of Warcraft while finding a name was a stupid idea after I started blogging with a software which is called drunken panda.
catntent is the CMS powering my companies homepage. I am currently working on it to release it under the BSD license.
I am using Django and separating most applications - this way you pick what you need, add it to a project, write your template or extend the apps. Most Django based systems I know brake with the app principle, force everything in one folder structure (mostly breaking down things like models, views, custom model managers…) you have to study and integrate everything so tightly that it is nearly impossible to replace parts of it.
New Years Resolution
There simply are none. I do not need a new year to change things. I do not wait till a certain point in time to try to improve. I just start doing it as fast as I can and see a reason to. Just as a short clarification since some people asked.
Next Week
I currently have three posts waiting to be published. I fear @sternenkind getting sick of reading my ramblings and trying to make some sentences suck less. I should also update my portfolio and if I find some time rework the about section of this site. I wish you a great week :)