February 2007
Feb. 13, 2007
Too many Chiefs... OpenID’s current biggest problem is that there are plenty of OpenID providers but not nearly enough places that you can log in to with one.
FreeYourID.com. A free .name domain for 90 days, with built-in tools for managing e-mail forwarding and your OpenID. Could do with some unobtrusive JavaScript, but they’re really fast at responding to suggestions.
Feb. 14, 2007
Multimap API: Decluttering Markers (via) V1.2 of the Multimap API is out, and the nicest new feature is automatic decluttering of close-together markers.
Tutorials on Microformats. Roger Costello’s 11 tutorials on microformats, covering hCard, hCalendar, hReview and more.
Django templates in Venus. It’s nice to see the Django template system being used outside the context of the overall framework.
Tips for Writing Nicer Site Badges. Ed Eliot’s putting together a much needed set of best practices for badges and widgets.
Feb. 15, 2007
Introducing RDFa. A way of representing RDF triples in XML that doesn’t suck.
IE and 2-letter domain-names (via) IE won’t let you set a cookie on XX.YY, where YY is anything other than .pl or .gr. Other browsers have better exception lists.
Rails 1.2.1 Impression. I hadn’t seen assert_select before, which lets you unit test generated HTML using CSS selectors; a really neat idea.
PHP and “OpenID authentication failed: Bad signature”. If you’re seeing a “Bad signature” error in your PHP OpenID application it could be down to a miscompiled GMP library.
Content delivery system design mistakes. Collection of tips for optimising Web server performance. Mentions lighttpd/nginx, Keep-Alive, expires headers, noatime and more.
The bright side: web spam is an evolutionary force that pushes relevance innovations such as trustrank forward. Spam created the market opportunity for Google, when Altavista succumbed in 97-98. Search startups should be praying to the spam gods for a second opportunity.
AOL and OpenID. http://openid.aol.com/your-screenname now works as an OpenID, for every AOL user. Wow.
We don't yet accept OpenID identities within our products as a relying party, but we're actively working on it. That roll-out is likely to be gradual.
— John Panzer, AOL
Automated Translation of Java to Python. java2python can translate most Java code in to non-idiomatic Python, using ANTLR for the heavy lifting.
Les Orchard: “Web 3.0 will have Galactica-style angled corners.” (via) Here’s hoping.
Feb. 16, 2007
Badge Any RSS Feed With Yahoo! Pipes. Smart hack from Kent Brewster. Uses Yahoo! Pipes’ JSON output plus a few lines of JavaScript to create a badge from any RSS feed.
The Zimki Plan. Zimki is a hosted JavaScript application server by Fotango. The idea is to open source it, then build a component so developers can seamlessly switch to hosting on Fotango’s server farm if they need to handle a spike in traffic.
Feb. 17, 2007
OpenID is particularly appealing to OLPC, because it can be used to perpetuate passwordless access even on sites that normally require authentication [...] With an OpenID provider service running on the school server (or other trusted servers), logins to OpenID-enabled sites will simply succeed transparently, because the child's machine has been authenticated in the background
Wikipatterns. Great idea this: a wiki documenting patterns for successfully growing your own wiki.
What is The Daily You? New feature from Pegasus News that customises the site based on your browsing history and their detailed taxonomy. Probably useful if you live in Texas, but interesting nonetheless.
Quick Django Benching. Django under Apache/mod_python outperforms nginx/FastCGI and LightTPD/FastCGI once you ramp up the concurrency levels. My setup for this site (Apache/mod_python behind an nginx proxy, with nginx handling static files) should give the best of both worlds.
The upshot is that HTTP does not have everything that REST indicates should be present, and there is the additional problem that while HTTP is the first, and best, implementation of REST, the two are not the same and yet are often confused.
Neighbourhood Fix-It. Report problems to your council across the UK. The most detailed Ordinance Survey maps anywhere online, and a superb example of progressive enhancement in action—the maps work without JavaScript, and the site even works without images!
Translation From PR-Speak to English of Selected Portions of Macrovision CEO Fred Amoroso’s Response to Steve Jobs’s “Thoughts on Music”. By John Gruber.
parseDateString function in dateparse.js return wrong date for ’2006-12-31’. I didn’t realise that you have to initialise a JavaScript Date object in a certain order; if you don’t weird bugs can result.
Feb. 18, 2007
30 second PyPy tutorial. Zyroth on programming.reddit.com shows how to interactively compile a Python function to C using PyPy and benchmark it against the original.
Feb. 19, 2007
Geek | Manager. Meri Williams is one of the most productive people I know. This is her new blog on being a manager and a geek at the same time, with plenty of productivity advice.
Feb. 20, 2007
Django IRC FAQ. Frequently asked questions from the Django IRC channel.
Feb. 21, 2007
OpenID at the Future of Web Apps
People seemed to really like my talk—they even laughed in the right places! I’ll be posting full notes, slides and writing an article for Vitamin over the next few days. For the moment I’m just enjoying coming down from the adrenaline high.