August 2007
Aug. 11, 2007
In an effort to improve all Google services, we will no longer offer the ability to buy or rent videos for download from Google Video [...] After August 15, 2007, you will no longer be able to view your purchased or rented videos.
Ubuntu -- python-django. Sweet, Django 0.96 is packaged for Ubuntu Gutsy.
I've been in this web standards game for five years now and probably have over 100 standards-based sites under my belt. I can count the number of times I've be involved in a redesign where no changes were made to the markup on one finger.
Aug. 13, 2007
Blueprint. A CSS Framework. I’ve been trying to articulate why I’ve started to think that structural class names are a necessary evil in the comments.
Open source is neither an industry fad, nor a magic bullet.
Finding Lookup Items that Are Not Used. How to do left outer joins (and other custom SQL) using the Django ORM.
Aug. 14, 2007
Website for the masses!
You could try building it on top of a wiki engine, like MediaWiki—see my comment on this older question.
[... 33 words][On Blueprint] I'm somewhat conflicted with its release because I don't think it should be used. Don't get me wrong, it's great, but don't use it.
List anonymous wikipedia edits from interesting organizations (via) See anonymous edits from CIA IP addresses, Fox News and more.
Emerging consensus in favour of a unified document format standard? A call to arms from Mark Shuttleworth—help convince ISO to adopt ODF as a single unified document format standard.
By picking up its marbles and going home, Google just demonstrated how completely bizarre and anti-consumer DRM technology can be.
Aug. 15, 2007
jQuery for JavaScript programmers
When jQuery came out back in January 2006, my first impression was that it was a cute hack. Basing everything around CSS selectors was a neat idea (see getElementsBySelector) but the chaining stuff looked like a bit of a gimmick and the library as a whole didn’t look like it would cover all of the bases. I wrote jQuery off as a passing fad.
[... 2,608 words]This is all your app is: a collection of tiny details.
AuditTrail. Add change tracking and history to a Django model with a single line of code. Doesn’t handle relationships though, which is definitely the toughest part of this problem.
AOL & OpenID—Status Update. It looks like they’re whitelisting a small list of providers for the moment. I’m not sure what this means for delegation.
Lazy Function Definition Pattern. Neat JavaScript trick: redefine a function the first time it’s called, for example to switch in different browser implementations based on object detection.
The World Beard and Moustache Championships 2007. In Brighton on the 1st of September, tickets are a fiver. Unfortunately we’re moving that day so we probably can’t make it.
Some Notes on the YUI Rich Text Editor. Dav Glass explains how he achieved the impressive feat of building a rich text editor widget that also works in Safari.
Aug. 16, 2007
Brighton geek venues. Nat’s latest project: a neat Google Maps mashup listing venues for geek events in Brighton, managed using Google MyMaps to edit a KML file.
Prototype 1.6.0 release candidate. Prototype gets a long-needed update to its Event API, and some interesting new Function.prototype extensions.
Operation Aborted. Another fantastically obscure IE bug: appending new elements to the HEAD element breaks if a BASE tag is present.
mobileterminal (via) The iPhone now has a GUI terminal application, which can run a comand-line SSH client. Now I really want one.
Grab them eyeballs! Any cred at all! Excellent argument for why large OpenID consumers shouldn’t be worried that other large providers will turn evil and hold their users hostage. What counts is the account, not the credential.
Why FireFox is Blocked. Idiotic campaign by site owners who don’t like AdBlock Plus. If you block Firefox we won’t link to your site, so you’ll miss out on PageRank, so you’ll miss out on traffic, so you’ll miss out on money.
Aug. 17, 2007
OpenID: Great idea, bewildering consumer experience. Realistic, detailed look at the many usability problems that currently surround OpenID—and a good list of suggested fixes at the end. This is why I’ve been advocating OpenID as a tool for early adopters: they can help smooth out the experience for everyone else.
Windows Live ID Web Authentication Released! Passport lives again! Who’s going to be first to build an idproxy.net for it?
DictMixin. I wasn’t aware of this Python class (part of the UserDict module): lets you implement __get__, __set__, __del__ and keys() and provides the other dictionary methods for you.
Learning jQuery. An entire year’s worth of jQuery tutorials, split in to beginner, intermediate and advanced.
VeriSign’s SeatBelt OpenID plugin for Firefox. The first good example of browser integration for OpenID. It catches phishing attempts by watching out for rogue OpenID consumers that don’t redirect to the right place.
Base32 encoding (via) I was on the verge of inventing this when I discovered that Douglas Crockford had invented it for me.