Simon Willison’s Weblog

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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.

# 4:43 pm

Text Search in Rails. Rails extension to add search APIs to your models, based on LIKE queries.

# 7:01 pm

Parsewiki, a Documentation System Based on ASCII Text. Does a rather good job of converting TaviWiki markup to LaTeX.

# 11:06 pm

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.

# 11:23 am

How to receive emails with Action Mailer in Rails. It’s surprisingly easy. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised.

# 5:16 pm

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.

# 9:45 pm

Cross-site request forgery (CSRF). Somehow this vulnerability is news to me.

# 11:07 pm / csrf, security

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.

# 12:21 am

Taking the unsafe GETs out of Rails. A great explanation of the problem, and a decent stab at a solution.

# 12:27 am

Spinning teeth. Too bling for words.

# 1:16 am

Mouseover DOM Inspector v2.0 Help (via) One of my favourite bookmarklets just got even better.

# 8:27 am

Linux event draws in open source luminaries (via) Crikey, I’m a misspelled CSS and JavaScript guru.

# 11:50 am

May 10, 2005

Dive Into Greasemonkey. If you’re not in to Greasemonkey yet, now you have no excuse.

# 10:50 pm / mark-pilgrim, greasemonkey

May 11, 2005

Ajaxed out. Scott Andrew reports from the O’Reilly / Adaptive Path Ajax summit.

# 9:18 am

Why You Should (or Should Not) Use the Yahoo! Music Engine. Engineers are better at marketing than marketing people.

# 1:14 pm

BBC Backstage (via) Feeds, APIs, and other geeky stuff. This is really, really good.

# 5:11 pm

Representational State Transfer. As usual, Wikipedia has a superb take on a complex and frequently misunderstood topic.

# 7:17 pm

OS X Network Location support from the command line. Thank you! I’ve been wanting something like this for ages.

# 9:24 pm

May 12, 2005

Penguin Remixed (via) Spoken word samples, yours for the mixing.

# 9:28 am

Making Wrong Code Look Wrong. How Hungarian notation was misunderstood, and why exceptions reduce collocation and make code harder to debug.

# 12:52 pm

Netscape.com (warning: may upset). Holy cow. They’ve redesigned using all Flash. It’s horrifying.

# 7:21 pm

Wired News Releases Source Review. The depressing spyware story I linked to a few months may be inaccurate.

# 11:34 pm

May 13, 2005

Google Answers: Google Florida Update. Oldie but goldie—great SEO advice from December 2003.

# 11:48 am

How To Roll Out An Open API. Great advice for producers of web services.

# 6:14 pm

May 17, 2005

Wired News: Firefox Users Monkey With the Web. Greasemonkey on Wired—and I get quoted!

# 12:27 pm / greasemonkey, firefox

Chicago crime database. Includes a really slick integration of Google Maps.

# 4:36 pm

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.

# 5:23 pm

May 18, 2005

2005 » May

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