May 2006
May 1, 2006
Change Safari’s default search engine—revisited (via) Good Lord, you have to edit the Safari executable!
Shopping Search APIs on Yahoo! Tech. The new Yahoo! Tech site uses the public shopping APIs.
Speaking gigs
I’ve been doing a fair amount of public speaking recently, based on the principle that the only way to get good at it is to get a lot of practise. My last two talks were a session on Django and Web Application Frameworks at the ACCU 2006 conference and a talk on the Yahoo! Developer Network for NMK’s Beers and Innovation series.
[... 304 words]Two steps backward. Another dumb attempt at a proprietary “reader” for online newspapers.
Microsoft make a reader for the NY Times? Wuh? Interesting comment from John Dowdell attached.
Jeff Maurone blogs about the Times Reader (via) He’s one of the developers. Great to see them blogging; still don’t believe in the product though.
Brad Neuberg introduces dojo.storage. Incredibly technically impressive, embodying months of accumulated expertise.
May 2, 2006
CustomEvent: onFontResize (via) Neat little hack using an iframe with width set in ems.
Django “magic-removal” branch merged. Finally! Django’s model layer is now a heck of a lot cleaner.
EasyEclipse LAMP Edition. Eclipse pre-configured for LAMP development. Haven’t tried it myself but it looks good.
May 3, 2006
Neutrality of the Net. Tim Berners-Lee on the most important issue facing the ’net today.
Django for non-programmers. Jeff Croft’s intro to Django.
Django: Web Development for Perfectionists with Deadlines. Jacob’s presentation at the Googleplex, on Google Video.
May 4, 2006
Screw YouTube (via) The backlash begins? “The people I used to know on YouTube got banned, saw their accounts set to zero or just left by themselves.”
Master Foo’s Taxation Theory of Microformats. “Perhaps we can hide custom XML languages *inside* these standard XML languages”.
AJAX and Screenreaders: When Can it Work? James Edwards tests various DOM update notification techniques.
RailsConf Europe: September 14-15 in London. 500 spots, 400 quid early-bird special.
May 5, 2006
A step-by-step SQLAlchemy tutorial (via) Looks like a superb piece of software.
Web Hosting’s Dirty Laundry. Unsurprisingly, hosting “review” sites are just after the referrals.
May 9, 2006
Rewind. Alex Russell quits Jot to work on Dojo full time.
Base32. Express large numbers in a neater form; good for URL transmission.
May 10, 2006
Yahoo! UI Library: Grids CSS. This stuff is absolutely brilliant.
AutoComplete, Windowing, Menu and More: A Second Beta Release for the YUI Library. More design patterns, more widgets, new CSS stuff, lots of improvements overall.
So long Safari?
All browsers have bugs—especially relating to fancy JavaScript stuff. Any truly complex web application is likely to run in to browser bugs, and fixing them takes a whole bunch of time. Bugs in IE and Firefox are pretty well understood, as are the workarounds for them.
[... 317 words]PHP: __halt_compiler(). This is nuts.
May 11, 2006
mnot: Vendor-pires (via) WS-* vendors and vampires.
Opera Mini 2.0
Just as I was getting thoroughly sick of the whole X-2.0 trend along comes a product I can really get excited about. Opera Mini 2.0 is a truly lovely piece of software. It’s a free web browser for your phone, accompanied by a free proxy:
[... 308 words]Build Your Own Website the Right Way Using HTML and CSS. Ian Lloyd’s book. Sounds perfect for beginners.
May 12, 2006
__halt_compiler()—how nuts? There are good reasons for it to exist. I still think it’s nuts though.
May 13, 2006
Microsummaries in Firefox 2. Neat new feature: short summaries of pages extracted using XSLT.