Simon Willison’s Weblog

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37 items tagged “history”

2008

The Sea Forts (via) History and stunning photos of British World War II sea forts (kind of steel castles on stilts) seven and a half miles off the coast of Kent.

# 27th April 2008, 10:51 pm / history, seaforts, photography, wwii

Happy Run Some Old Web Browsers Day! jwz has recreated home.mcom.com, the original home of the Mosaic Communications Corporation, using a snapshot from 21st October 1994 and a domain borrowed from current owner AOL. Also includes instructions on running 1994 Mosaic Netscape binaries under a modern Linux distro.

# 31st March 2008, 5:54 pm / aol, jwz, mosaic, history, linux, netscape, browsers

2007

Opera 9.5 alpha, Kestrel, released. “With history search, Opera creates a full-text index of each and every page you visit, and when you go to the address bar, you can simply start entering words you know have been on pages you’ve visited before, and items matching your search show up.” I just tried this; it’s magic. I’m switching back to Opera from Camino.

# 16th September 2007, 8:34 pm / opera, camino, browsers, history, search, kestrel, full-text-search

Paul Otlet described the “radiated library” in 1934. Beating Vannevar Bush in predicting something not unlike the Web by more than a decade.

# 12th September 2007, 5:28 pm / vannevar-bush, paul-otlet, radiatedlibrary, jason-kottke, history

AuditTrail. Add change tracking and history to a Django model with a single line of code. Doesn’t handle relationships though, which is definitely the toughest part of this problem.

# 15th August 2007, 1 pm / django, orm, history, audittrail, python

A brief unofficial history about register_globals in PHP. It’s been more than five years since register_globals was disabled by default in PHP 4.2.0.

# 30th April 2007, 8:20 am / php, history, registerglobals, philip-olson

2003

Pepy’s diary

Pepy’s Diary is a serialization of the Diary of Samuel Pepys in weblog form, which launched on Christmas day plans to continue for the next ten years (the time period covered by the diary). The weblog is quickly becoming a meme, and Phil Gyford, its creator, has written an overview of how publicity spread after the diary’s launch. He has also written a story for BBC News Online describing the project. I am reminded of Bloggus Caesari, a historical weblog by Julius Caesar.