Simon Willison’s Weblog

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Thursday, 1st May 2003

Firebird Switch Campaign

Why You Should Switch to the Mozilla Firebird by Ben Goodger is an excellent overview of Firebird’s advantages over other browsers, hosted on the Phoenix project site. I’m really looking forward to the release of 0.6 as a good, stable, easy to use browser I can recommend to non-geeky friends.

Feedster AND searching

Feedster finally supports AND as the default search operator. This is a very good thing. I’ve decided to leave this site’s search engine as using OR, mainly because I feel for a small search set (approximately a thousand entries) more search results is better than fewer search results and because relevancy algorithm used by MySQL to order the results appears to be working extremely well. For large data sets such as Feedster or Google I definitely prefer to only see results containing all of my search terms.

XUL and PHP

XUL: rendering GUIs with PHP and XUL to PHP-GTK, both on the excellent phpPatterns(). If you’re using a Gecko-based browser be sure to check out the XUL Interface to phpPatterns() proof-of-concept, which adds an XUL powered menu bar to the browser chrome at the top of the page.

iTunes Web Service?

Via Tim Bray, it turns out Apple’s new iTunes Music Store is driven under the hood by a whole load of XML documents, which are available via HTTP. Here’s hoping this leads to something similar to the Amazon Web Services API.

2003 » May

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