Simon Willison’s Weblog

Subscribe

Saturday, 17th February 2007

OpenID is particularly appealing to OLPC, because it can be used to perpetuate passwordless access even on sites that normally require authentication [...] With an OpenID provider service running on the school server (or other trusted servers), logins to OpenID-enabled sites will simply succeed transparently, because the child's machine has been authenticated in the background

Ivan Krstić

# 12:42 am / olpc, openid

Wikipatterns. Great idea this: a wiki documenting patterns for successfully growing your own wiki.

# 12:51 am / atlassian, patterns, wiki

What is The Daily You? New feature from Pegasus News that customises the site based on your browsing history and their detailed taxonomy. Probably useful if you live in Texas, but interesting nonetheless.

# 1:12 am / pegasusnews, recommendations

Quick Django Benching. Django under Apache/mod_python outperforms nginx/FastCGI and LightTPD/FastCGI once you ramp up the concurrency levels. My setup for this site (Apache/mod_python behind an nginx proxy, with nginx handling static files) should give the best of both worlds.

# 4:56 pm / apache, deployment, django, fastcgi, lighttpd, modpython, nginx

The upshot is that HTTP does not have everything that REST indicates should be present, and there is the additional problem that while HTTP is the first, and best, implementation of REST, the two are not the same and yet are often confused.

Joe Gregorio

# 5 pm / http, joe-gregorio, rest

Neighbourhood Fix-It. Report problems to your council across the UK. The most detailed Ordinance Survey maps anywhere online, and a superb example of progressive enhancement in action—the maps work without JavaScript, and the site even works without images!

# 5:05 pm / barcamplondon2, javascript, maps, matthew-somerville, mysociety, progressive-enhancement

parseDateString function in dateparse.js return wrong date for ’2006-12-31’. I didn’t realise that you have to initialise a JavaScript Date object in a certain order; if you don’t weird bugs can result.

# 7:04 pm / date, javascript