Simon Willison’s Weblog

Three new features for reddit gold. Reddit’s experiments with a subscriber program are interesting to watch. 9,000 people signed up as subscribers without there being any benefit at all, and they’re now being rewarded with the ability to opt out of ads and access to computationally expensive features (like different ways of sorting their own user page) that wouldn’t scale for the entire user base.

# 5:54 pm / ads, reddit, scaling, recovered, subscriptions

Easier custom Model Manager Chaining. A neat solution to the problem of wanting to write a custom QuerySet method (.published() for example) which is also available on that model’s objects manager, without having to write much boilerplate.

# 6:21 pm / django, orm, queryset, recovered

[UPDATE] Spatial Search in Apache Lucene and Solr. Spacial search is finally coming (back) to Solr—trunk now supports sorting and boosting by distance.

# 6:28 pm / lucene, search, solr, recovered, spatialsearch