Simon Willison’s Weblog

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Thursday, 28th August 2008

URLsafe base64 encoding/decoding in two lines. A much better solution than my base65 hack—if you understand how base64 padding works (I didn’t) you can use it to generate URL-safe compressed hashes. Performance should be significantly better than my version.

# 9:57 am / base64, base65, python, urlsafe

Using Akismet with Django’s new comments framework. A nice example that demonstrates two features that were recently rolled in to the Django 1.0 betas: the new signals library and the new comments framework.

# 10:12 am / akismet, comments, django, python, signals, spam

FriendFeed Blog: Simple Update Protocol. FriendFeed infamously poll RSS feeds on the 43 services they support millions of times an hour in an effort to keep their content as real-time as possible. SUP is a new proposal by FriendFeed for a sort of “master feed” of changes to a site—instead of hitting the Flickr feed for each of their users they would just poll Flickr’s SUP feed every minute or so to find out who had uploaded a new photo, and only retrieve the RSS feed for those users.

# 12:16 pm / atom, feeds, flickr, friendfeed, polling, rss, sup

Capital Radio (the new site). Launched today, this is the Django-powered project I’ve been working on with the fantastic team at GCap.

# 2:47 pm / capitalradio, django, gcap

How to use Google Code’s code review tool. I missed this, but Google Code now has a pleasantly simple code review system built in to the source code browser. You can add comments to any changeset, including annotations attached to individual lines of code.

# 4:25 pm / codereviews, google-code, googleprojecthosting