Simon Willison’s Weblog

In-Depth django-sphinx Tutorial. Another neat Django extension from the guys at Curse: easy integration with the sphinx full text search engine. 12:03 am

xssinterface (via) Clever JavaScript library for implementing opt-in cross-domain messaging in JavaScript (allowing communication between pages and iframes on different domains). Uses HTML 5’s postMessage API if available, otherwise falls back on either Google Gears or a clever cookie hack. 12:08 am

Gears 0.2 Released! New modules are HttpRequest and Timer, both for use within workers (which provide Erlang-style message passing concurrency). Particularly interesting is that the Gears HttpRequest module can be used for much cleaner Comet implementations in IE. 12:21 am

CouchDB, XML, and E4X. Brilliant—CouchDB now enables SpiderMonkey’s E4X support, meaning CouchDB views can easily query XML documents stored inside JSON objects using E4X syntax. 12:31 am

Acid3 is out. The third Acid test, again compiled by Ian Hickson. This one viciously tests DOM Scripting standards compliance and currently exposes flaws in every browser. 12:34 am

About our maps. Why and how EveryBlock rolled their own maps. 1:05 am

How to Do Anything Photographic (via) A huge collection of excellent looking photography tutorials by Ken Rockwell. 1:12 am

Ward Cunningham’s Visible Workings. Intriguing idea: software that explicitly reveals the underlying business logic in end-user understandable terms. I didn’t find the example very easy to comprehend but the concept is fascinating. 1:53 am

Equidistant Objects with CSS. Handy tip; I needed to do this recently and ended up setting everything using pixels. This works much better. 9:26 am

Internet Explorer 8 Readiness Toolkit. The new built-in development tools look similar enough to Firebug to make me very happy. Also of interest: Selectors API (for fast getElementsBySelector), CSS 2.1 support, support for XHTML style namespaces in HTML, an interesting Web Slices feature based on the hAtom microformat and 6 connections per host (up from 2) which should make Comet easier. 6:28 pm

Welcome to Fire Eagle! It’s launched! A service and accompanying API for saving your physical location and selectively sharing it with applications that you trust. 7:05 pm