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Simon Willison’s Weblog

About this site

I’m Simon Willison, and this is my personal weblog. I write about my technical interests, which mainly relate to client- and server-side web development.

I’m a co-creator of the Django Web framework, which powers this site.

I am available for freelance work. The opinions expressed on this site do not necessarily reflect those of my clients.

You can e-mail me at simon @ this site’s domain.

Colophon

This site runs on a custom weblog application written in Python using Django. It is hosted by mod_python running on Apache 2 behind nginx, on an Ubuntu Virtual Machine at Bytemark. The database is MySQL 4.

Dynamic images are created using the Python Imaging Library. ElementTree is used throughout for munging XML.

The search engine is powered by hyperestraier, running as a local Web service. OpenID support is built around the JanRain Python library. Version control is handled by Bazaar.

Atom feeds are served by FeedBurner. Photos are hosted on Flickr, and pulled in using the Flickr API.

Recent code changes

  • 1st May 2008: Made it much easier to flag comments on entries as spam, using Ajax
  • 1st May 2008: Feeds now contain 30 items, not 15
  • 22nd January 2008: Fixed tag pages to show quotations as well
  • 19th January 2008: Added year to date display for 'recent code changes'
  • 19th January 2008: Added support for tag intersection, and reduced the number of tags shown in the global tag cloud
  • 6th December 2007: Whitespace nowrap on timeago span on homepage
  • 6th December 2007: Speaking admin now lets me filter talks by topic
  • 21st September 2007: CSS and speaking app tweaks
A django site