Simon Willison’s Weblog

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April 2007

April 18, 2007

Google AJAX Feed API (via) Simple cross-domain proxy to allow JavaScript to access any publically addressable syndication feed, with the same logic as Google Reader providing normalisation.

# 5:29 pm / google-reader, ajax, javascript, crossdomain, google, rss, feed, atom, syndication

I believe this tribe is, over time, growing farther away from the rest of the world. That's happening for an interesting and important reason, which is that the tools we are building and using are accelerating our ability to build and use more of these tools.

Jon Udell

# 5:39 pm / jon-udell

A Hack for Europe! Signups are now open for Hack Day Europe, on June 16th and 17th. You need to apply for an invitation.

# 11:24 pm / yahoo, bbc, bbcbackstage, hackday, tom-coates

April 19, 2007

Death and Taxes (via) Beautiful massive zoomable/pannable infographic of the 2008 Federal Discretionary Budget.

# 2:37 am / infographic, politics, ajax, javascript

Minako Organic Japanese Restaurant. On 18th and Mission in San Francisco. We ate there this evening—the meal took three hours and was worth every minute.

# 8:38 am / sushi, san-francisco, yelp

April 20, 2007

The New Upcoming. No more metros! Upcoming is now hooked in to Yahoo!’s WhereOnEarth data, meaning plenty of geocoded brilliance.

# 12:13 am / geocoding, upcoming, yahoo, whereonearth

The website to web application gradient. Jeremy snapped this cunning illustration at my JavaScript Libraries panel at the Web 2.0 Expo.

# 12:30 am / web2expo, web2expo07, jeremy-keith, dojo, yui, gwt, jquery, john-resig, alex-russell, brettaylor, matt-sweeney, javascript, flickr

Full Java Stack In Ubuntu. JDK6, Glassfish, NetBeans and Java DB are all available in the Multiverse repository for Ubuntu 7.04.

# 12:37 am / ubuntu, java, simon-phipps

disinfographics. These really are pretty remarkable.

# 4:15 am / michal-migurski, disinfographics

I've always said that setting up a web site for most folks is scary and intimidating - but myspace, with all your friends there, lends itself to a helping culture. Everyone shares how to do whatever with their circles of friends... they get by with a little help from their friends.

Phil Torrone

# 4:37 am / phil-torrone, myspace

libketama (via) A consistent hashing algorithm for memcache clients, from the team at last.fm.

# 6:50 am / lastfm, hashing, memcache, les-orchard

How to Moderate a Panel. By Derek Powazek. I tried to follow this advice a couple of days ago.

# 7:41 am / derek-powazek, speaking, moderation, panel

Internet Explorer Application Compatibility VPC Image (via) Microsoft have made free VPC images of IE 6 and IE 7 available for testing, but they expire in August.

# 4:47 pm / microsoft, ie, ie7, testing, virtualization

There's a simple rule of thumb: Every ten minutes of commuting results in ten per cent fewer social connections. Commuting is connected to social isolation, which causes unhappiness.

Robert Putnam

# 5:39 pm / commuting, qualityoflife

April 23, 2007

Scaling Twitter (via) Slides from Blaine’s recent talk.

# 11:02 am / blaine-cook, twitter, scaling, rubyonrails

The Dojo Offline Toolkit (via) A small client runtime provides a proxy server which offline applications can use to store data; a client library provides code for online/offline detection and data synchronisation.

# 11:56 am / dojo, dojooffline, offline, brad-neuberg

CSSEdit 2.5 Out Now! (via) Like John Gruber says, this is the best implementation of application tabs I’ve ever seen.

# 8:26 pm / john-gruber, cssedit, tabs, ui

April 24, 2007

Turn your Django application in to an OpenID consumer

I’ve just put the finishing touches on the first releasable version of django_openidconsumer, a package that makes it easy to add OpenID consumer support to any Django application.

[... 229 words]

Cats Can Has Grammar. Anil Dash gives lolcats the analysis they deserve.

# 2:02 am / lolcats, anil-dash

django-logging. Looks neat—includes the ability to use Python’s standard logging module to log messages to a footer appended to your site’s HTML output.

# 6:50 am / logging, django, python

Seven JavaScript Techniques You Should Be Using Today (via) Sound advice from Dustin Diaz, who is now a Googler.

# 8:20 am / google, dustin-diaz, javascript

April 25, 2007

The Web Design Survey, 2007. A List Apart is trying to learn more about our community.

# 1:47 am / a-list-apart, surveys

The sliding scale. Jeremy’s write-up of my panel at the Web 2.0 Expo, with illustrative photograph.

# 7:09 pm / web2expo, javascript, ajax, jeremy-keith, speaking

Scribd. This appears to be social software for the huge population of people who can’t imagine creating anything without using Word.

# 7:22 pm / bemused, scribd, socialsoftware, word

Oxford Geek Night videos. The videos from the last Oxford Geek Night have now been posted.

# 9:01 pm / oxford-geek-nights, oxfordgeeknight2

The joy of pdb.set_trace(). I use nosetests --pdb-failures as my main entrypoint for Python debugging—it starts the debugger at the first failing test.

# 11:37 pm / pdb, python, debugging, testing, nose

Introducing http:BL (via) Project Honey Pot announce a new blacklist service for blocking comment spammers and e-mail spiders using information from their network of honey pots.

# 11:39 pm / honeypot, security, commentspam, spam, blacklist

April 26, 2007

Adobe open sources Flex. Ted Leung says that this might indicate the possibility of Adobe open sourcing Flash itself in the future.

# 11:24 am / flash, adobe, ted-leung, open-source, flex

April 27, 2007

hAccessibility. The use of the abbr element in hCalendar causes screen readers to read out an incomprehensible number instead of a date.

# 1:07 pm / microformats, hcalendar, accessibility

2007 » April

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