May 2005
May 3, 2005
Andy King’s SEO presentation (PDF). One of the few people you really should listen to when it comes to this stuff.
Text Search in Rails. Rails extension to add search APIs to your models, based on LIKE queries.
Parsewiki, a Documentation System Based on ASCII Text. Does a rather good job of converting TaviWiki markup to LaTeX.
May 4, 2005
Giving away the index
My final year project is due in two weeks, and I’m going to be running on silent for most of them. I have, however, upgraded to Tiger and playing with Spotlight has given me plenty to think about.
[... 414 words]Web Essentials 2005. Australia’s brightest and best web conference returns for its second year.
How to receive emails with Action Mailer in Rails. It’s surprisingly easy. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised.
May 6, 2005
Fighting RFCs with RFCs
Google’s recently released Web Accelerator apparently has some scary side-effects. It’s been spotted pre-loading links in password-protected applications, which can amount to clicking on every “delete this” link — bypassing even the JavaScript prompt you carefully added to give people the chance to think twice.
[... 353 words]URIs, Addressability, and the use of HTTP GET and POST. A comprehensive, if slightly dry, overview of the issue.
Cross-site request forgery (CSRF). Somehow this vulnerability is news to me.
May 9, 2005
Sam Ruby: Sincerest Form Of Flattery. How Sam’s funky referral tracking works. I talked to Ping about a similar system at SxSW.
Taking the unsafe GETs out of Rails. A great explanation of the problem, and a decent stab at a solution.
Spinning teeth. Too bling for words.
Mouseover DOM Inspector v2.0 Help (via) One of my favourite bookmarklets just got even better.
Linux event draws in open source luminaries (via) Crikey, I’m a misspelled CSS and JavaScript guru.
May 10, 2005
Dive Into Greasemonkey. If you’re not in to Greasemonkey yet, now you have no excuse.
May 11, 2005
Ajaxed out. Scott Andrew reports from the O’Reilly / Adaptive Path Ajax summit.
Why You Should (or Should Not) Use the Yahoo! Music Engine. Engineers are better at marketing than marketing people.
BBC Backstage (via) Feeds, APIs, and other geeky stuff. This is really, really good.
Representational State Transfer. As usual, Wikipedia has a superb take on a complex and frequently misunderstood topic.
OS X Network Location support from the command line. Thank you! I’ve been wanting something like this for ages.
May 12, 2005
Penguin Remixed (via) Spoken word samples, yours for the mixing.
Making Wrong Code Look Wrong. How Hungarian notation was misunderstood, and why exceptions reduce collocation and make code harder to debug.
Netscape.com (warning: may upset). Holy cow. They’ve redesigned using all Flash. It’s horrifying.
Wired News Releases Source Review. The depressing spyware story I linked to a few months may be inaccurate.
May 13, 2005
Google Answers: Google Florida Update. Oldie but goldie—great SEO advice from December 2003.
How To Roll Out An Open API. Great advice for producers of web services.
May 17, 2005
Wired News: Firefox Users Monkey With the Web. Greasemonkey on Wired—and I get quoted!
Chicago crime database. Includes a really slick integration of Google Maps.
Mac OS X 10.4: “Erase data on device” is the default first sync option in iSync 2.0 (via) This bug wiped my phone’s address book. Thankfully it’s fixed in 10.4.1.
May 18, 2005
Why’s (Poignant) Guide to Ruby :: 6. Downtown. Chapter 6 is here!