Thursday, 15th July 2004
Instant authentication against an existing web application
I was thinking today about the problem of querying an existing authentication database from a new application—exactly the kind of thing web services are useful for. Then I realised that any web application protected by HTTP Basic authentication already provides a standard API against which queries can be run. Here’s the Python code to do exactly that:
[... 187 words]How to write Firefox extensions. Somone emailed me a link to this.
Wikalong Firefox Extension. I got an email tip off about this one too!
Per-site user stylesheets
I’ve been thinking a lot about per-site user stylsheets recently. Eric Meyer’s CSS signatures are great for sites that support them (as this site does), but the sites that really need altering are highly unlikely to carry them. I posted a comment to that effect on photomatt.net a while ago, and thankfully it was spotted by Ryan Tomayko who has published a simple brilliant hack that uses XBL in Mozilla’s user stylesheet to execute JavaScript which adds a CSS signature to every site you visit.
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