Simon Willison’s Weblog

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Thursday, 15th February 2007

Introducing RDFa. A way of representing RDF triples in XML that doesn’t suck.

# 12:22 am / rdf, rdfa, xml

IE and 2-letter domain-names (via) IE won’t let you set a cookie on XX.YY, where YY is anything other than .pl or .gr. Other browsers have better exception lists.

# 12:33 am / cookies, dns, ie, mark-pilgrim

Rails 1.2.1 Impression. I hadn’t seen assert_select before, which lets you unit test generated HTML using CSS selectors; a really neat idea.

# 9:14 am / assertselect, css, rails, unittests

PHP and “OpenID authentication failed: Bad signature”. If you’re seeing a “Bad signature” error in your PHP OpenID application it could be down to a miscompiled GMP library.

# 10:02 am / gmp, openid, php

Content delivery system design mistakes. Collection of tips for optimising Web server performance. Mentions lighttpd/nginx, Keep-Alive, expires headers, noatime and more.

# 11 am / http, lighttpd, nginx, performance

The bright side: web spam is an evolutionary force that pushes relevance innovations such as trustrank forward. Spam created the market opportunity for Google, when Altavista succumbed in 97-98. Search startups should be praying to the spam gods for a second opportunity.

Rick Skrenta

# 11:15 am / google, spam, startups

AOL and OpenID. http://openid.aol.com/your-screenname now works as an OpenID, for every AOL user. Wow.

# 11:27 am / aol, openid

We don't yet accept OpenID identities within our products as a relying party, but we're actively working on it. That roll-out is likely to be gradual.

John Panzer, AOL

# 11:33 am / aol, john-panzer, openid

Automated Translation of Java to Python. java2python can translate most Java code in to non-idiomatic Python, using ANTLR for the heavy lifting.

# 3:50 pm / antlr, java, java2python, python