Simon Willison’s Weblog

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Thursday, 29th July 2004

Interactive generators. Uche says generators are issuing in an exciting new era of Python XML processing. # 6:19 am

Improving online credibility

If you’ve browsed Amazon’s product reviews recently you may have noticed an interesting new feature: Badges, little icons displayed below certain people’s names. This isn’t a new idea by any means—many online communities use special icons as rewards for members who make valuable contributions (SitePoint is a good example). What’s interesting about Amazon’s badges is that one of them is “Real Name”. Amazon’s Real Names FAQ explains the badge, and includes the following:

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Great Hackers. “Of all the great programmers I can think of, I know of only one who would voluntarily program in Java. And of all the great programmers I can think of who don’t work for Sun, on Java, I know of zero.” # 3:01 am

Jimmy Wales on battling wiki spam

Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia was interviewed recently by the Slashdot community. One of the questions regarded protecting Wikis from spammers:

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How to handle international dates and times in PHP and MySQL. Keith tackles a common point of irritation. # 1:25 am

SCPlugin (via) Subversion plugin for the Finder. # 1:08 am

HTTP Caching & Cache-Busting for Content Publishers (via) I learnt a lot from this—especially the no-cookie domain stuff. # 12:45 am