Simon Willison’s Weblog

json-tinyurl. Because sometimes you want to be able to create a shorter version of a URL directly from JavaScript without hosting your own server-side proxy.

# 10:58 am / jsontinyurl, json, jsonp, appengine, projects, javascript, tinyurl

Django 1.0 release party. The big ass-party will be at the Tied House in Mountain View on Saturday the 6th from 7pm. RSVP on the linked announcement.

# 12:07 pm / bigassparty, django, djangocon, tiedhouse, party, mountainview

Django 1.0 beta 2 released! 1.0 draws ever closer. Important new features include major documentation and comment system refactorings, plus the removal of a bunch of deprecated code (including oldforms). Feature and string freezes are now in place, so it’s just bugs and documentation improvements between now and the final release.

# 2:41 pm / django, python

Django snippets: Sign a string using SHA1, then shrink it using url-safe base65. I needed a way to create tamper-proof URLs and cookies by signing them, but didn’t want the overhead of a full 40 character SHA1 hash. After some experimentation, it turns out you can knock a 40 char hash down to 27 characters by encoding it using a custom base65 encoding which only uses URL-safe characters.

# 10:18 pm / django-snippets, django, python, hashes, sha1, base65, cryptography, security, cookies, signedcookies, urls