Thursday, July 10, 2008
This straight from Vilnius, Lithuania: I am at the EuroPython conference; the presentation part ended yesterday and starting today it will be software sprints until Saturday.
I gave a talk about writing applications in a week, called — surprise, surprise — “Build an app in a week“. Of course it was based heavily on the whole BLF experience; there was Django, there was the admin/user GUI, there were tricks and lessons learned the hard way. The slides are available right here.
On a related note, have you ever heard someone say Vilnius was beautiful? If so, they were not mistaken. It truly is.
Thursday, March 27, 2008
Finally, the third installment in our site-in-a-week series is online, stretching the definition of a week somewhat as we published it 15 (fifteen) days after the work started. We did lose about 5 days of productive time due to Bootstrap and Easter, but even taking that into account we still clearly chose something that did not fit within the boundaries we set for the series. Either too much features or too much polish.
Anyway, it’s done and alive now.
The site is called oiola.com and helps you organize an event. At this moment this means it lets you:
- create a page with all the details: when, where and what is going to happen, complete with a map,
- gather registrations from people who would like to attend; you choose whether registration is optional, required or required-and-accepted-by-you (so that you can limit the number of attendees, if that is what you need),
- insert a widget with event details and registration form on your web page, to make it easier for attendees.
Of course, we want to improve and extend the site, so we would be happy to hear your opinions about what it should look like. Also, the site is public, but accounts are not — we are in the testing stage, so if you would like to give the site a try contact us to sign up.
The site is only in Polish right now.
Thursday, February 28, 2008
News from the past, #2: WebComicsPot.
If you ever tried to publish a webcomic you will know that, once you’re done drawing, inking, painting, scanning, selecting, retouching and saving final, beautiful versions of your files there is one more step left: create a website that is easy to use, easy to update, looks good, displays your news, contact details and allows people to comment on your work. That’s what WebComicsPot is for. And it’s multilingual, too 
That was the second of our one-week projects, created at the beginning of this month. It was fun, even though we missed the deadline by three days (then again, we started with five days of delay, so we regained a bit).
Just like in favpico we tried to make the site as simple as possible: you provide a list of URLs pointing to your images and WCP does the rest for you. The only requirement is that each URL must contain a date (YYYY-MM-DD) so that we know when to show which page. You can also customize your site by adding your own HTML code in the sidebar and your own CSS code in the header.
It is also our first site to support (only) OpenId — we have much too many passwords already and don’t want to create more.
To wrap it up: it was a very educational experiment. We already got some great feedback on using the site and the reactions are so positive that we want to put more time into it
And next month, well, we will most probably create something more complex. Stay tuned.
