Change

This site will henceforth serve solely as an archive of old posts that I’ve written. From now on, I’ll be writing over at The Masterplan.

Parseltongue

I’ve been meaning to learn Python for the past few months, but something or the other has always gotten in the way. I finally got started a month or so ago, and I have to say, Python is a very elegant (and powerful) language to program in.

I’ve learnt “enough” basic Python to start playing around with Django, a brilliant high-level Web framework that “encourages rapid development and clean, pragmatic design”. I’ve just gotten started, and so far it’s been fun. I’m really looking forward to building Django-powered Web sites/applications in the near future.

Ruby is another language that I started learning along with Python, mostly to see if I wanted to use the Rails framework. Ruby is a great language as well, and seems to have a lot in common with Python. But when it comes down to it, I think I just “get” Python better than Ruby. I’m going to go with Python (and Django) for now, but will definitely consider learning/using Ruby and Rails in the future.

Also, I’m not sure if I want to work with PHP any more.

‘A Byte of Python‘ is a great book to get started with programming in Python, if you’re so inclined.

Just Write

After a bit of a lull, here’s the latest in the ‘Sessions‘ series of interviews on The Masterplan; an exclusive interview with Jesse Grosjean, founder of Hog Bay Software, best known for his popular WriteRoom application. For those of you who haven’t heard of WriteRoom yet, here’s how Jesse describes it:

WriteRoom is not Microsoft Word. It won’t generate a table of contents, it won’t place borders around your documents, and it doesn’t have an animated paper-clip looking over your shoulder. Instead WriteRoom just provides the essential features required to get words on the page. Stay focused with WriteRoom’s distraction free environment. Stay on track with word count. Stay safe with autosave. You just type, and WriteRoom will do its best to stay out of your way.

To start with, what have you been up to of late, both personally and with Hog Bay Software?

My focus at Hog Bay Software has been on TaskPaper 2.0, since, well last October when I released 1.0. My initial plan was to release 2.0 a month or so later — well, that’s obviously not quite worked out, but 2.0 is coming along nicely I think. I make fairly regular “development” drops in my user forums for users to try out and comment on.

Personally, we have a two-and-a-half-year old, and thats been taking up lots of my free time in a great way. We are also planning a month long trip to Korea and Japan in a few weeks (in celebration of my wife’s graduation with an engineering degree). So that’s the big exciting thing we are looking forward to.

Would you like to tell everyone reading this a little more about Hog Bay Software? When was it formed? What made you start your own software company?

I started working on “it” (had a few other names to start with) when the OS X beta came out. At the time my real job was at the university of Maryland HCIL lab, working under Ben Bederson. He was doing lots of cool research in zooming user interfaces, and I helped write the frameworks to support that work.

In many ways, that was pretty much the perfect job, but in the end I still wanted to work “all” on my own and that’s why I started Hog Bay Software. I was particularly interested in the Mac from the technological side of things — I wanted to be working in Cocoa, instead of in Java, which is what I was doing my job in.

What other names had you thought of for the company? How did you come to settle on “Hog Bay”?

For a bit I was “Livingsoftware”. There I was trying to encode some of my goals (flexible software that involved my users) in the name. But it turns out that even though livingsoftware.com was available, there were lots of different companies that thought the term was “theirs”.

I decided to go with “Hog Bay” because that’s where I grew up. And my parents have a shop named “Hog Bay Pottery and Weaving“. So I was pretty confident that I wouldn’t have trouble with other people thinking that they owned the name.

For a while, the “Hog Bay” name seemed to be a bit of a drawback — I had quite a few people e-mail [me], saying that they loved the apps, but hated the name, but for some reason (I think once I’ve become a bit better known, and people have had a chance to get used to it), all those complaints seem to have gone away. Probably been years since I’ve [last] had a complaint.

Read the rest of this entry »

Sunday Night

Just launched the brand new Split Radio Web site on Sunday night. Started in October 2006 as an extension of Split Magazine, Split Radio is an Internet radio station exclusive to bands from the Indian subcontinent. Over the past year and a half, the radio station has become quite popular in India, and will exist as a separate entity now, and not ‘just’ as a part of the magazine. It was also featured in the inaugural issue of Rolling Stone India (with a picture of me!) last month. Do check it out, there are a lot of really good bands on there.

I also launched a Videos section on Split about a month ago. Some of the featured videos are really well-made, especially the documentary about the Big Chill Festival, Goa. You definitely don’t want to miss watching that.

The past few weeks have been really tiring for me, in terms of work. That situation isn’t likely to improve in the foreseeable future. Not sure if that’s a good or bad thing.

Yesterday

I first heard of and used WordPress a few years ago (back when the latest version was 1.5), only because one of the Web sites I was writing for was powered by it. My first impressions of WordPress revolved mostly around the administration panel — I thought it was fairly easy to use, but looked quite awful. I was also involved with another site at the time that was powered by Textpattern, and compared to that, WordPress definitely felt a bit bulky.

You should know that during this time, I used to work solely as a writer/editor (full-time as well as freelance), and wasn’t too involved with the programming and development side of things. Graphic design (print and Web) was just a hobby at the time.

A couple years later, I was still working as a writer, but I did a lot of design and programming work on the side as well. I launched Split Magazine at around this time (January 2006). The very first edition of the magazine was strictly hand-coded. I was looking for a content management system to power the magazine — I wanted something that wasn’t too complex, had a user-friendly admin panel and allowed you to implement your own designs (as opposed to a CMS that forces you to work around generic portal templates).

Having used it a few years ago, I remembered Textpattern as being quite elegant and easy to use, so I installed it on a test server and started playing around with it. After two or three days of trying to work with it, Textpattern somehow didn’t seem to be ideal for what I was trying to do. I started looking for other content management systems, and ended up trying Typo3, Joomla! and Drupal, but they weren’t the easiest to work with, and just felt like they did too many things. Just to clarify, I don’t mean to be disrespectful to these applications. I have heard a lot of good things about them — all I’m saying is that they just weren’t right for me.

I didn’t even think of WordPress at the time, because I didn’t have a very memorable experience the first time around — and frankly, I didn’t know too much about it. I don’t quite remember the details now, but somehow I happened to come across WordPress, and thought I’d give it a shot — one final attempt before I went back to Textpattern and tried once again to make it work for me.

By then, the latest version of WordPress was 2.0.2. I downloaded and installed it (the five-minute install seemed too good to be true until I tried it out), and was pleasantly surprised by how much the administration panel had improved. I found a nice theme (don’t quite remember which one it was, unfortunately) and tried my best to make it look as magazine-like as possible. With the help of a couple plugins, and after a lot of tearing my hair out, I was able to accomplish that.

I started playing around with WordPress some more until I knew enough to make my own theme from scratch. Around July 2006, I created my first “proper” magazine-like theme (with a white/grey/ice blue colour scheme) for Split Magazine (and was quite proud of that effort), after which I worked on the new avatar of Nirali Magazine with Priya in September 2006. By this time, I was quite sure I could create a WordPress theme based on pretty much any page layout. The current version (in terms of design) of Split was launched in October 2006. Fast forward to right now, and you have this weblog and The Morning After theme for WordPress to add to (several) other WordPress-based sites that I’ve worked on.

As most of you already know, WordPress 2.5 was released a few days ago. This release (code named “Brecker”) features a whole lot of new stuff, including a much improved file uploading system (now with multi-file uploads and progress bars), a built-in photo gallery system, easier plugin upgrades, and a brand new administration panel.

WordPress has clearly improved a lot since version 2.0 (which was a big improvement from version 1.5). I didn’t quite like the direction that the WordPress developers were going in with versions 2.1 and 2.2, but version 2.3 (”Dexter”) was a step in the right direction, and the current release is definitely my favourite version of WordPress by far.

To (finally) wind this up, I’d love to hear about how you got started with WordPress, and your thoughts about WordPress 2.5.

Go.