Simon Willison’s Weblog

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May 2006

May 1, 2006

Change Safari’s default search engine—revisited (via) Good Lord, you have to edit the Safari executable!

# 1:27 pm

Shopping Search APIs on Yahoo! Tech. The new Yahoo! Tech site uses the public shopping APIs.

# 10:21 pm

Speaking gigs

I’ve been doing a fair amount of public speaking recently, based on the principle that the only way to get good at it is to get a lot of practise. My last two talks were a session on Django and Web Application Frameworks at the ACCU 2006 conference and a talk on the Yahoo! Developer Network for NMK’s Beers and Innovation series.

[... 304 words]

Two steps backward. Another dumb attempt at a proprietary “reader” for online newspapers.

# 11:28 pm

Microsoft make a reader for the NY Times? Wuh? Interesting comment from John Dowdell attached.

# 11:29 pm

Jeff Maurone blogs about the Times Reader (via) He’s one of the developers. Great to see them blogging; still don’t believe in the product though.

# 11:30 pm

Brad Neuberg introduces dojo.storage. Incredibly technically impressive, embodying months of accumulated expertise.

# 11:33 pm / brad-neuberg, dojo, dojostorage, javascript

May 2, 2006

CustomEvent: onFontResize (via) Neat little hack using an iframe with width set in ems.

# 10:26 am

Django “magic-removal” branch merged. Finally! Django’s model layer is now a heck of a lot cleaner.

# 12:46 pm

EasyEclipse LAMP Edition. Eclipse pre-configured for LAMP development. Haven’t tried it myself but it looks good.

# 2:45 pm

May 3, 2006

Neutrality of the Net. Tim Berners-Lee on the most important issue facing the ’net today.

# 12:13 am / tim-berners-lee, net-neutrality

Django for non-programmers. Jeff Croft’s intro to Django.

# 3:13 pm

Django: Web Development for Perfectionists with Deadlines. Jacob’s presentation at the Googleplex, on Google Video.

# 5:32 pm

May 4, 2006

Screw YouTube (via) The backlash begins? “The people I used to know on YouTube got banned, saw their accounts set to zero or just left by themselves.”

# 12:14 am

Master Foo’s Taxation Theory of Microformats. “Perhaps we can hide custom XML languages *inside* these standard XML languages”.

# 9:58 am

AJAX and Screenreaders: When Can it Work? James Edwards tests various DOM update notification techniques.

# 10:21 am

RailsConf Europe: September 14-15 in London. 500 spots, 400 quid early-bird special.

# 11:01 am

May 5, 2006

A step-by-step SQLAlchemy tutorial (via) Looks like a superb piece of software.

# 2:53 pm

Web Hosting’s Dirty Laundry. Unsurprisingly, hosting “review” sites are just after the referrals.

# 5:28 pm

May 9, 2006

Rewind. Alex Russell quits Jot to work on Dojo full time.

# 7:40 am / dojo, jotspot, alex-russell

Base32. Express large numbers in a neater form; good for URL transmission.

# 1:58 pm

May 10, 2006

Yahoo! UI Library: Grids CSS. This stuff is absolutely brilliant.

# 8 am

AutoComplete, Windowing, Menu and More: A Second Beta Release for the YUI Library. More design patterns, more widgets, new CSS stuff, lots of improvements overall.

# 9:33 am

So long Safari?

All browsers have bugs—especially relating to fancy JavaScript stuff. Any truly complex web application is likely to run in to browser bugs, and fixing them takes a whole bunch of time. Bugs in IE and Firefox are pretty well understood, as are the workarounds for them.

[... 317 words]

PHP: __halt_compiler(). This is nuts.

# 5:28 pm / php

May 11, 2006

mnot: Vendor-pires (via) WS-* vendors and vampires.

# 3:45 pm / mark-nottingham

Opera Mini 2.0

Just as I was getting thoroughly sick of the whole X-2.0 trend along comes a product I can really get excited about. Opera Mini 2.0 is a truly lovely piece of software. It’s a free web browser for your phone, accompanied by a free proxy:

[... 308 words]

Build Your Own Website the Right Way Using HTML and CSS. Ian Lloyd’s book. Sounds perfect for beginners.

# 11:40 pm

May 12, 2006

__halt_compiler()—how nuts? There are good reasons for it to exist. I still think it’s nuts though.

# 12:43 am

May 13, 2006

Microsummaries in Firefox 2. Neat new feature: short summaries of pages extracted using XSLT.

# 10:18 am

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