Jazz Up the Web: The Making Of

I’ve been humbled by the amount of time and effort it has taken me to write a Python app to extract the entries on my Manila sites.  Maybe I’m not as great of a programmer as I think I am after all!  I’ve run into lots of little challenges so far and have kept detailed notes, but I’m not ready to explain the pieces yet.  I figure that I’ll do so when I unveil the whole package of code and release the tool to the public.

I’m teaching “Mixing and Remixing Information” once again Spring 2007. I’m also writing a book on the subject matter of the course. The book proposal that I had originally written follows a logic that does not account for the demands of teaching a 15 week course that meets twice a week. I now need to create myself a schedule which does reconcile the sometimes conflicting, but somtimes harmonious, demands of writing a book and teaching a course during an overlapping time frame.

One decision that I’m contemplating right now is whether to use Python in the course. I am definitely planning to use Python as the core language to illustrate my book, and therefore, it might make sense to use it also in my course. Last spring, I stayed away from Python because the primary textbook for the course (oreilly.com — Online Catalog: Flickr Hacks) used Perl and PHP. The students found PHP to their liking but, by and large, found Perl to be a bit confusing. I didn’t make a concerted effort to teach programming directly. This time around, I will probably push programming techniques more explicilty and use Python for those purposes. I would like to retain some PHP and perhaps introduce Ruby on Rails, but we’ll see.

Even though I’ve been back from my vacation almost two weeks now, I’m only now managing to get back to writing on my various weblogs. Though I can blame countless numbers of distractions, I will single out computer programming for particular admonition. In my ideal working framework, I would spend half my day programming and the other half writing. In the last weeks, whenever I start programming, I have found it tough to stop. Including today. My immediate programming task is to expand ManilaExporter, an application to export data out of a Manila site so that a user can migrate that information to other sources, such as another weblog. Though relatively straightforward in principle, I’ve continued to run into enough little practical barriers that suck me deeply into the nitty-gritty of programming. (For example, I’m trying to figure out how to indicate to the Python xmlrpclib that my Manila site is emitting ISO-8859-1 even though XML-RPC doesn’t allow for any indication of character encoding. I think that there may be a bug in the xmlrpclib module but it will take some work to track down whether it’s a bug or whether it’s just my misunderstanding of the library.)

So what next? How can I maintain the depth of focus needed to write software without losing sight of the broad vision I am pursuing? Certainly, writing about the details of programming and how it ties into the big picture is my chosen way forward.