The speaker lineup for Kings of Code looks really good and I’m excited to get to meet some awesome developers. If you’re in Amsterdam for the conference, be sure to say “hi.”

Defunkt and I are working on a web IRC client which will certainly be awesome. I didn’t get to be part of the dash last year since Pownce was a sponsor and I haven’t done any timed hacking for awhile so I’m pretty excited.

Want to join in the dash? Registration is now open.

If you go to a project on GitHub, you’ll see there’s a new Issues tab. Click on the tab to check out the project’s Issues.

For the full tour, check out the GitHub blog post about Issues.

Issues is unique in that there aren’t any Owners, Priorities, or Milestones - only labels, like GMail. This allows project owners and users make up their own system to suit the project. You can also sort the issues by drag and drop, so you can move the important ones to the top.

I’ve filed some pretty good issues during alpha testing.

The original plan was for Issues to launch on April Fool’s Day, so this issue was meant as a joke. Sorry Rails!

Try out GitHub Issues, and let me know what you think. Disclaimer (yesss, I finally get to make a disclaimer): I’m an advisor to GitHub.

Here it is: Tiny Tiny URL

This is my first Ruby code ever, so please be nice.

The basic idea is to have the user enter a URL, then store that URL in the database. The only columns in the database are the auto-incrementing primary key and the URL. To create fancy short URLs, the id is base36 encoded/decoded. That’s all people.

Actually, Gruber’s post was prompted by Digg’s new DiggBar which frames sites with a top navigation bar served by Digg. This is annoying on several levels, mostly because it obscures the page’s URL.

Here’s the example: http://digg.com/d1nYVs

I pretty much agree with Gruber about the importance of URLs: they should tell a user where they are and be simple, informative, and easy to share. I also don’t agree with Digg branding my (personal) project site and serving ads against it either (just click on the “Related” link on the Digg bar to get an ad).

Baconfile is my pet side project and I’ve had a lot of fun developing it in my free time over the past couple months. It’s a web interface for files on Amazon S3 and I actually love that it’s not very popular. All the fun of running a website without any hassle

I actually implemented my own URL shortener for Baconfile, called tinyb.cn (Tiny Bacon). Instead of shortening any URL on the web though, it’s only used for URLs that redirect for Baconfile. The idea being that when a user sees a tinyb.cn URL, they might guess that it redirects to baconfile.com.

Here’s a URL to a file permalink page on Baconfile:
http://baconfile.com/wilsonminer/This%20thread%20is%20useless/

Here’s the Tiny Bacon URL for that page:
http://tinyb.cn/2j

There’s even a Twitter button on the bottom of each Baconfile permalink page that redirects to Twitter and pre-populates your tweet with the tinyb.cn URL. It doesn’t require a username/password, nor does it post the tweet for you automatically, it’s just a link - like this.

I created tinyb.cn to make tiny URLs more transparent and informative instead of misleading and self-serving. I’m sure I’ll write more about how to make a URL shortener, but for now let’s just consider how we can use tiny URLs for good.

The Django pony speaks at PyCon. Photo by Ted Leung.

On Saturday night a bunch of Django peeps ended up singing some live karaoke. Luckily I had my Flip camcorder and was able to put the embarrassing videos up on Vimeo.

Bohemian Rhapsody Karaoke - Andy Smith and Tony Hauber sing Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody.

Wanted Dead or Alive Karaoke - Chris Wanstrath and Eric Florenzano sing Bon Jovi’s Wanted Dead or Alive.

Thanks to everyone who gave shout-outs to all the ladies on their blogs and Twitter and such! Yay! I’m terribly sorry I missed the pledge drive, but I’ll participate anyways.

A woman in technology I admire is Marissa Mayer. Sure, it seems kind of easy to pick the most famous female Googler, but I really like the idea of Marissa Mayer. I like to imagine that she’s the midwestern frosty blonde evil genius running the whole company and Sergey, Larry and Eric are just her stooges. Of course this isn’t entirely true, but it’s fun to think about. Besides, I wish I had that job.

On a more serious note, I greatly admire Valerie Aurora, Elaine Wherry, and Lisa Phillips. While they are very different kinds of hackers (Linux kernel, JavaScript, and systems administration), I know them all through the great work they have done for open source software.

Speaking of geekery, forget following me on Twitter - follow me on GitHub!

As if no serious buisiness can take place without data being converted to and from XML.

On one of my side projects, django-elsewhere, an open source Django plug-in for managing a list of social network profiles, I ran into a similar issue. I’ve been maintaining a list of known social networking sites in a Python file. Since renaming the project (Django-PSN to Django-elsewhere) and moving it to GitHub, there’s been much fussing about what sites should be included in the list.

So why not just move the data into a database?

SQL databases are great for large amounts of data or data that gets updated often. To me, it didn’t make a lot of sense to store a near-static list of social networks in a database. I outlined my thoughts in a GitHub comment:

Sadly, I’m going to lose this battle (in fact I’ve already lost). Why?

Because Python lists don’t feel right.

Databases, YAML files, and XML feel right.

As good programmers, we’ve been trained to love standards and compatibility. Why, when anticipating working only in one language, can’t we just use the data structures of that language to store data?

I really love that Django project settings are, by default, stored in a file called settings.py.

settings dot PY!

A Python file!! It makes perfect sense, use Python data structures to store data only used by a Python application. It’s easy to read and manipulate, all in Python. I’m sure there was a bit of “why not use YAML?” with regards to the settings.py and cheers to it remaining in Python.

So yes, I think it’s okay to have internal APIs pickle and external APIs only do JSON. Feel free to dispute in the comments but I say: know your audience, know your application, and sometimes it’s okay to feel wrong.

I’ll be giving a keynote there (topic TBA) along with a bunch of other fabulous speakers such as Jacob Kaplan-Moss, Blaine Cook, Joe Stump, and Zed Shaw.

There’s lots of exciting stuff going on with Django these days so it’s definitely worth making the trip out to Prague. If speaker line-up doesn’t convince you, there’s always the botel.

When I started using Flickr a couple years ago and as a regular Facebook user I was shocked to find no “people tagging.” My friend ceedub recommended picking a tag for myself, then telling all my friends to tag me with it in all their photos. Lame.

Another great use of people tagging is blog social networks like LiveJournal and Vox. I love writing a blog post and linking to all my friends mentioned in the post. Actually, I might build that feature into the next version of my leahculver.com blog

I’m so sad that Pownce was really my first attempt at a consumer web product and that I didn’t get much of a chance to iterate on its product design. I’m taking a bit of a break from making social apps right now, but I can’t help but mull over the little things that really make the web feel like people party.