Simon Willison’s Weblog

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Tuesday, 8th February 2011

UK Web Archive: WW2 People’s War. Good news: the British Library has already archived the BBC’s WW2 People’s War site (on 22nd May 2006).

# 12:58 am / archiving, bbc, britishlibrary, recovered

What are some good user interface/user experience workshops/conferences coming up this March(p.s. distance isn’t a factor, I’m willingly to travel)?

We have a list on http://lanyrd.com/topics/user-ex...—the best option in March looks to be Adaptive Path’s MX conference: http://lanyrd.com/2011/mx/ / http://mxconference.com/

[... 51 words]

Is South the best tool to use when doing database migrations in Django?

Yes. And I say that as an author of another Django migrations tool (dmigrations) which offered a small subset of South’s current functionality.

[... 42 words]

Is a relational database with many-to-many relationships difficult to develop into a web app?

Many to Many tables can be a bit of a pain to deal with using regular SQL, but a good ORM can abstract away any potential complexity almost entirely. I find using the Django ORM means I’m much less likely to shy away from a design that involves a many-to-many relationship because I know it won’t increase the complexity of the application. I imagine the Rails ORM has the same effect.

[... 91 words]

elasticsearch: Percolator. Another fascinating elasticsearch feature: Percolator lets you register searches with your elasticsearch cluster, then pass in a document and have the matching query IDs returned. It’s an upside down search engine. I’m sure there are some very neat things you could build with this, I just haven’t figured out what they are just yet.

# 11:16 pm / elasticsearch, search, recovered

2011 » February

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