Simon Willison’s Weblog

Google Font Directory: Font Preview. Handy tool for trying out the 18 open source fonts Google have released, along with server-side browser sniffing technology that serves up the correct version (including for IE6). The browser sniffing makes me a bit uncomfortable—will it play well with intermediate caches? What happens if I save a local copy of a page and then open it up in a different browser?

# 3:20 pm / fonts, google, recovered, webfonts, sniffing

Doing things with Ordnance Survey OpenData. Jo Walsh’s guide to processing Ordnance Survey OpenData using PostgreSQL and PostGIS.

# 3:22 pm / mapping, open-data, ordnancesurvey, postgis, postgresql, recovered, jo-walsh

ZOMBO.com in HTML5. Uses SVG (scripted by JavaScript) and the audio element. Finally, Zombo.com comes to the iPad.

# 3:26 pm / audio, html5, ipad, svg, recovered, zombo, zombocom

App Engine at Google I/O 2010. OpenID and OAuth are now baked in to the AppEngine users API. They’re also demoing two very exciting new features—a mapper API for doing map/reduce style queries against the data store, and a Channel API for building comet applications.

# 3:30 pm / appengine, comet, google, mapreduce, oauth, openid, recovered

The Guardian’s Open Platform is open for business. The Guardian’s Content API is now out of beta. Of particular interest: you can access basic article metadata (headline, URL and tags) without using an API key at all, and the API supports JSONP—just request format=json and include a callback=foo argument.

# 5:40 pm / api, guardian, json, jsonp, openplatform, recovered, content

OpenPlatform Content API Explorer. The new API explorer for the Guardian’s Content API.

# 5:42 pm / api, guardian, openplatform, recovered, api-explorer