Simon Willison’s Weblog

EuroDjangoCon. 4th-6th of May 2009, in Prague. Talk submissions are open now, and registration starts on the 6th of February.

# 6:54 pm / conferences, django, djangocon, eurodjangocon, events, prague, python

FluidDB domain names available early (and free) for Twitter users. It’s interesting how Twitter has revitalised the concept of usernames as first class identifiers. FluidDB hasn’t even launched yet, but it’s allowing people to reserve their Twitter username within the FluidDB system just by following @fluidDB.

# 11:44 pm / fluiddb, identity, terry-jones, twitter, usernames

Crowbar. Headless Gecko/XULRunner which exposes a web service API for screen scraping using a real browser DOM—just pass it the URL of a page and the URL of a screen scraping JavaScript script (a bit like a Greasemonkey user script) and get back RDF/XML.

# 11:52 pm / crowbar, dom, gecko, greasemonkey, mozilla, rdf, screenscraping, webservice, xml, xulrunner

google-mobwrite. Neal Fraser’s terrifyingly clever differential synchronization algorithm (for SubEthaEdit-style collaboration over the web) is now available as an open source Python and JavaScript library.

# 11:55 pm / collaboration, google, javascript, mobwrite, neal-fraser, open-source, python, subethaedit

Neil Fraser: Differential Synchronization. Paper describing a robust method for “keeping two or more copies of the same document synchronized with each other in real-time”, over a variable network connection using clever diff algorithms.

# 11:57 pm / algorithms, diff, neal-fraser, paper

OWASP: XSS Prevention Cheat Sheet. Comprehensive set of rules for avoiding XSS—there’s a bit more to it than just escaping all output variables, since you have to take markup context in to account.

# 11:58 pm / markup, owasp, security, xss