July 2007
July 1, 2007
There is a problem of managing identity across the internet, so when I say Darren Waters I mean this person and all of the manifestations and representations and personas of that person. The ability to knit those together is a huge challenge and opportunity for us as an industry.
dnspython. Python DNS toolkit—seems like the kind of thing that should be in the standard library.
Processing Web Documents using Alexa Web Search, Amazon S3 and Amazon EC2. I’m not sure when it happened, but Alexa Web Search can be hooked in to EC2 now—presumably with free bandwidth between the two.
Google Health Advertising Blog: My opinion and Google’s (via) A follow up to the post I linked to earlier.
July 2, 2007
Web hosting landscape and mod_wsgi. Graham Dumpleton explains how mod_wsgi’s daemon mode should provide secure Python deployment for commodity hosting providers.
jQuery Taconite Plugin. Lets you serialize jQuery DOM manipulation commands as an XML document for retrieval via Ajax.
Gmail and Django. I’d never considered using Gmail to send e-mail from applications, but it could be a useful way of avoiding having outbound e-mail falsely flagged as spam.
July 3, 2007
I can't say enough good things about Django. Professionally, it was one of the best technical decisions that I got to make early on at Tabblo.
HTML Entity Character Lookup. Look up HTML entities by characters that are a similar shape.
Google Translate (beta). Google’s beta translator based on statistical analysis of things like the United Nations corpus. I have no idea how long this has been available; it isn’t linked from their homepage.
The Geni “contact us” form. As you type your message, Geni pulls in likely entries from their FAQ using Ajax—with pretty decent results.
Lego Millenium Falcon Stop Motion. This introduced me to a whole world of YouTube Star Wars lego stop motion videos.
July 4, 2007
SlideShare: Webapps scalability. Lots of great presentations on scaling, from Twitter, Digg, Vox, LiveJournal, Last.fm and more.
Optimizing Web Applications and Content for iPhone (via) Apple’s iPhone developer documentation.
PyMOTW: subprocess. Better documentation for the swiss army knife of process control tools.
Django changeset 5609. “Merged Unicode branch into trunk. This should be fully backwards compatible for all practical purposes.”
Unicode data in Django. Documentation for Django’s new unicode support.
UnicodeBranch: Porting Applications. A checklist for porting Django applications to handle the new unicode changes. If your application only handles ASCII text at the moment you shouldn’t have to change a thing.
welovelocal.com. Nicely designed new local business review site, London only but going UK wide soon. OpenID enabled!
AND donate entire Netherlands to OpenStreetMap. OpenStreetMap just got a whole lot bigger.
July 5, 2007
There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things
Clever Caching. Instead of invalidating your cache directly, bump a version number on your model (blog entry or whatever) and use that as part of the cache key. This also gives you dynamic etags for free.
The Django Web Application Framework. I’m slowly pushing my presentations from the past couple of years up to Slideshare. This is a Django talk from April 2006, so it’s a little out of date.
Let there be web divisions. A call to arms from Jeffrey Zeldman: organisations need Web divisions that operate separately from Marketing and IT.
The music companies are in a dying business, and they know it. Sure, they act all cool because they hang around with rock stars. But beneath all the glamour these guys are actually operating two very low-tech businesses. One is a form of loan-sharking: they put up money to make records, then force recording artists to pay the money back with exorbitant interest. The other business is distribution.
July 6, 2007
The CSS Redundancy Checker. A tool for checking your markup for outdated CSS rules that don’t match any of your HTML. We were discussing the need for something similar to this at Torchbox a few weeks ago.
July 7, 2007
WS-* is North Korea and REST is South Korea. While REST will go on to become an economic powerhouse with steadily increasing standards of living for all its citizens, WS-* is doomed to sixty years of starvation, poverty, tyranny, and defections until it eventually collapses from its own fundamental inadequacies and is absorbed into the more sensible policies of its neighbor to the South.
Interview with Leah Culver: The Making of Pownce. Django + Perlbal + S3 + AIR.
Anyone who recently downloaded GreaseMonkey scripts from userscripts.org should check their scripts. I haven’t confirmed this, but this Jyte claim suggests that userscripts.org was hacked and cookie stealing code inserted in to some of the scripts. UPDATE: Not hacked; just bad scripts submitted through the regular process.
July 8, 2007
Introduction to Abject-Oriented Programming. The best part is the comments, where several people completely fail to get the joke.