Wednesday, 23rd January 2008
Introducing EveryBlock. EveryBlock launched! Adrian Holovaty, Wilson Miner, Paul Smith and Daniel X. O’Neil’s startup which answers the question, “What’s happening in my neighborhood?” Cities covered by the launch are Chicago, New York and San Francisco. # 9:56 pm
Dynamic Time-Travel Maps. Absolutely beautiful dynamic implementation of Chris Lightfoot’s Time Travel project, put together by Stamen Design and MySociety. Drag sliders to specify your preferred commute and housing budget to see where in London you can live. # 9:06 pm
Troubleshooting Memory Usage. Useful for getting the most out of a VPS. # 6:52 pm
Django People: Colophon. I’ve added a colophon to Django People, something I try to do for all of my personal projects. # 4:58 pm
Caching Layer for Django ORM. Interesting extension to Django’s ORM that adds automatic caching of querysets and smart cache invalidation. # 3:18 pm
Cashing in the Bling. Pownce is open to the public, and Leah has written up some neat friend importing tricks that take advantage of the pre-existing “profile bling” links to profiles on other sites. I hope to do something smart with the profile links on Django People in the future, although I’m not convinced the site would benefit from a “friends” mechanism. # 3:17 pm
Sunsetting Quirks Mode. Apparently proper standards support in IE (or at least the IE8 renderer) will be triggered by the HTML5 doctype, providing an alternative to those who don’t wish to pollute their markup with an IE-specific meta tag. # 2:56 pm
Legacy. James Bennett has what I think is the most interesting analysis of the X-UA-Compatible header to date. # 2:14 pm
GeoNames: missing countries. United Arab Emirates and a few other countries are missing from the GeoNames XML set I used to seed Django People. I’ve added UAE by hand; I’ll add the others as soon as I have time. # 10:45 am
Photo Matt: Act Two. Automattic is an excellent case-study of building a business on top of an open source project. # 10:42 am
If Web authors actually use this feature, and if IE doesn’t keep losing market share, then eventually this will cause serious problems for IE’s competitors — instead of just having to contend with reverse-engineering IE’s quirks mode and making the specs compatible with IE’s standards mode, the other browser vendors are going to have to reverse engineer every major IE browser version, and end up implementing these same bug modes themselves.
— Ian Hickson # 10:07 am
HTML 5 published as W3C First Public Working Draft! A significant step, almost completely overlooked in the hubbub over IE8. # 2:15 am
Django People
I’m constantly surprised by the number of people I run in to at conferences (or even in one case on the train) who are using Django but are completely invisible to the Django community. It seems that this is the downside of having good documentation: many people just read it and start building, without ever showing their face on the mailing lists or IRC.
[... 194 words]