Today's a big day for us at EveryBlock. We're making our source code available. Over the past two years, EveryBlock has been funded by a grant from the Knight Foundation. The purpose of the grant was twofold: to launch this experiment in "microlocal" news, and to release the source code. Today, as our grant period comes to an end, we're fulfilling that second purpose. You can read more about the open-sourcing and download the code at our source code page. (Keep in mind it'll probably make sense only if you're a Web developer/programmer.) We hope this extensive code base helps spark lots of great work. But what about EveryBlock.com proper, now that the grant period is over? We've put a lot of love into this project over the past two years, and we're going to continue operating the site as a private company. Beyond continuing our steady expansion of new cities and more data types in existing cities, we have some exciting ideas planned around revolutionizing the whole EveryBlock experience itself. We're only getting started. :-)

This week Phillip Watts introduces us to Python introspection, which can help you write more efficient, dynamic code.

We last left off with Views with Mako, now Pylons does not enforce on you an ORM at all, so you can use hand crafted SQL if you prefer. However, since I’ve done enough of that for a career or two we’re going to use my Python ORM of choice and the preferred one for Pylons SQLAlchemy.