Yann’s Blog

So, I’m a copious project and idea mill. Sometimes my ideas actually gain some traction, but often they languish on my hard drive. The useful ones I eventually get around to releasing though, which is what this blog post is all about.

If you’ll head over to StackFoundry.com you can see my recently updated Other section. Highlights here include:

• quickmovie - a movie browser. I made this little program to keep a tally and easy to browse list of DVD images I keep on disk. It scans a directory (or set of), and grabs from IMDB relevant titles, summaries, and cover images. It has an AJAXy browser page which is served up by CherryPy allowing you to browse the list. Probably won’t get a lot of attention. The only feature addition I’m planning is to add a “Watch on date X” dialog, keeping track of when you last saw the movie (if ever).
• qsgen - a quick static site generator. Most sites really don’t need a CMS system such as Django, Plone, or Pylons. There is a lot of dynamic heavy lifting for really little marginal gain. Yes, some dynamic features (such as RSS feeds of news, etc) are cool, but do sites really need that? I guess I’m not Web 2.0 compliant in that sense, but I’m proud of it ;). qsgen is designed to take a site built from Mako .html templates and compile the templates into real .html files, copying along supporting images, CSS, and JS files (amongst others). Its a very basic little script, and only accepts two parameters I’m using it to build stackfoundry.com and tomeapi.com
• yyafl - Yann’s Yet Another Form Library. A re-implementation and adaptation of Django’s newforms library. It does use a few code pieces from the Django project (0.96.2), so it retains the same license as Django. It is designed to run stand-alone from the Django mega-infastructure though, allowing it to be used in projects such as Pylons and CherryPy as a form library. The API is not stable yet, as I’m overcoming some ugliness and rearranging some modules. Expect a release soon with a stableish API.

Beyond that, you can find the anyvcs and softwedge projects on the site. I’m looking for someone interested in anyvcs to help maintain a Mercurial port of it (and complete the git port ;)). I will be resuming work on anyvcs when I pick up wedge again, which is going to be after a first pass at tome.

As I said, I’m a copious project starter.