Simon Willison’s Weblog

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

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

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

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

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

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