Simon Willison’s Weblog

GeoPlanet Explorer. Chris Heilmann’s YQL powered explorer for the invaluable Yahoo! GeoPlanet / WhereOnEarth dataset. Every API deserves an explorer of some sort. 2nd March 2010, 8:14 am

JS-Placemaker—geolocate texts in JavaScript. Chris Heilmann exposed Placemaker to JavaScript (JSONP) using a YQL execute table. Try his examples—I’m impressed that “My name is Jack London, I live in Ontario” returns just Ontario, demonstrating that Placemaker’s NLP is pretty well tuned. 23rd May 2009, 12:36 am

Interview: Simon Willison on OpenID. Christian Heilmann interviewed me for the YDN blog. 3rd February 2008, 10:18 pm

Return of the HTTP overhead delay. Christian proposes a neat way of improving page performance, by delaying non-essential images such as avatars until after the rest of the page has loaded. 11th July 2007, 3:12 pm