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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

  • 25th August 2009: fixed template bug
  • 25th August 2009: Site search now just redirects to Google
  • 13th June 2009: Added OpenID 2 delegation, changed homepage to show 'today' next to entries posted today
  • 14th April 2009: Added Helvetica Neue to the font stack
  • 12th April 2009: Fixed bug where the live preview as you edited a comment broke with non-ASCII characters - thanks, Laurens Holst
  • 11th April 2009: Hooked in vanity URL shortener for quotes, entries and blogmarks
  • 11th April 2009: Added my own URL shortening service
  • 11th April 2009: OpenID provider
A django site