I’ve spread myself too thin. Inspired by Tantek’s What to do with things to do, I have decided to prune and close several projects:
- Dive Into Python is closed. Bug fixes, typos, small corrections will be accepted and eventually released, but no new chapters will be written. For over a year I have held out a small glimmer of hope that I would someday finish chapter 7, but it’s not going to happen. What you see is what you get.
- Dive Into Accessibility is closed. I will gladly help answer specific questions for people who wish to translate it, and I will host such translations on the site once completed, but there will be no effort to, for example, update the technical examples to include new publishing tools.
- Dive Into OS X is closed. It’s a wiki, so people are free to add to it, make corrections, refactor pages, whatever. Last December, I compiled a long list of OS 10.2-specific additions, which I never integrated. I will make this raw list available, but I will not be making any further effort to refactor or maintain the site. I am doing less and less Apple training these days, and the site has not been a significant resource the last few times I have taught.
- All my Python projects are closed except the ultraliberal RSS parser and PyTextile. Patches will be accepted to fix bugs in the other projects, but no new features will be added. Specifically, I have no intention of updating PyBlogger to support RSD, the MetaWeblog API, the RESTLog API, the Comment API, or the upcoming backwardly-incompatible Blogger 2.0 API.
- I will not be taking on any more design work. I have successfully designed weblog templates for 3 people, and it was fun, but it consumes more time and energy than I have right now.
- I will not be taking on any other side work. For example, last week a publisher contacted me about setting up an ongoing gig doing technical reviews of upcoming books. Sounds fascinating, great opportunity, flattered to be asked, don’t have the time.
- I will not be arguing the merits of web standards, CSS, accessibility, and open source. It is quite obvious to me that these are the future of the Internet and of the computing industry in general, and if you don’t see that by now, I can’t help you. Adapt or get left behind. I will be writing up some HOWTO articles on how to adapt (see below), but they will start from the assumption that you already want to.
So what am I working on? Well, we’re in crunch mode leading up to a major release in my day job, I’m getting married in less than a week, and then Dora and I are leaving the country for two weeks, and that’s only the stuff I’m telling you about. So I’m a little busy.
When I get back in June, I hope to be doing less blogging, but more writing. Specifically, I’d like to focus on 3 things:
- Writing HOWTO articles about accessibility and web standards, to be published by the Web Standards Project.
- Personal writing (filling out 100 stories of unfamous people).
- Following and contributing to the current effort to standardize RSS (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11). My contribution will likely take the form of
sitting back and waiting for a consensus to emerge
on RSS best practices, and then implementing the appropriate rules as an optional add-on to the RSS validator.
We’ll see how that goes; as any good writer will tell you, blogging is writer’s crack. But at least it’s a plan, which is more than I’ve had in a while.
Mark: But as far as Dave and Ben go, it doesn’t look like the goal is to “standardize RSS”. It’s to create an industry-specific profile of RSS elements that all blog apps should produce. It will only have an impact on those who want to claim they support “RSS for Weblogs”, not RSS in general.
You no doubt understand that, but I’m seeing a lot of people assuming that this has something to do with RSS as a whole, which doesn’t seem to be the real intent. As Dave pointed out, nothing that’s being talked about should have any impact at all on how, say, the Times produces its feeds.
Comment by Roger Benningfield — Sunday, May 11, 2003 @ 1:37 pm
Bravo Mark.
Comment by Mike Watkins — Sunday, May 11, 2003 @ 3:02 pm
I’m sorry to hear that about Dive Into Python - just last week I was trying to grok unit testing and remembered that DiP covered it. I re-read that chapter and it just clicked, so I showed it to several friends on my course at Uni and it clicked for them as well. It reminded me what a truly fantastic resource Dive Into Python is.
Congratulations on your pruning efforts. All of the projects you have listed seem to work just fine as they are, although I have to admit I would dearly love to see the end of chapter 7.
Comment by Simon Willison — Sunday, May 11, 2003 @ 3:23 pm
In such a moment, a look at the history of some of the projects now entered in maintenance mode could just put the reader in the right mood…
http://diveintomark.org/archives/2002/08/04/dive_into_history.html
It has been a long road, but I think we all (makers and readers) have been fun and enjoyed ourselves.
Comment by Giulio Piancastelli — Sunday, May 11, 2003 @ 5:49 pm
“My contribution will likely take the form of ’sitting back and waiting for a consensus to emerge’ on RSS best practices, and then implementing the appropriate rules as an optional add-on to the RSS validator.”
And don’t forget building valid MovableType templates! :)
http://feeds.archive.org/validator/docs/howto/MovableType.html
Again, congrats on the wedding! I hope you and Dora are a lot more prepared 1 week away from the wedding than Sarah and I were. I was physicaly ill the Tuesday before the Saturday I got married because of all the stress. It was a pretty bad week over all, but the day itself was *so* worth it.
Comment by Ken Walker — Sunday, May 11, 2003 @ 10:56 pm
Glad to see that “less blogging, but more writing”, and glad too you’d want to write more of “100 stories of unfamous people”, I like it, thanks :).
Comment by yowkee — Monday, May 12, 2003 @ 5:14 am
I am sad to hear about the demise of http://diveintopython.org … After repeatedly giving up on python, It was your site that made me finally sit and learn python.
Congrats on your marriage and have a great life :-)
Comment by anand — Tuesday, May 13, 2003 @ 12:25 am
Um. DiP isn’t going away, as I understand it, It’s just remaining where it is from now on :-)
Comment by Aquarion — Tuesday, May 13, 2003 @ 4:31 am
Thanks for all the work you’ve put into Dive Into Python. It’s a great resource, even in its present form.
Comment by Alan Green — Tuesday, May 13, 2003 @ 8:04 am
Looking at the comments so far, it seems like Dive Into Python has had the greatest impact. And I have to agree, DiP is what brought me from programming Python like Java to starting to understand (and program) idiomatic Python.
Would it be too much to ask that you turn over Dive Into Python to another author/maintainer, or make it into a community effort? I think a lot of folks would love to see more material. If need be, I’ll take over maintenance, but I’m not enough of a programmer yet to add significant content — though I can edit, and make suggestions for content I’d like to see written.
Thanks again for the work you’ve done.
Comment by phoukka — Tuesday, May 13, 2003 @ 11:48 am