Simon Willison’s Weblog

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Thursday, 8th October 2009

Cloudvox. A brand new startup offering “API-driven phone calls” with a beautifully simple webhooks based API. # 11:31 pm

Official Google Webmaster Blog: A proposal for making AJAX crawlable. It’s horrible! The Google crawler would map url#!state to url?_escaped_fragment_=state, then expect your site to provide rendered HTML that reflects that state (they even go as far as to suggest running a headless browser within your web server to do this). Just stick to progressive enhancement instead, it’s far less hideous. It looks like the proposal may have originated with the GWT team. # 5:52 pm

XSS Protection by Default in Rails 3.0. Fantastic news—congratulations, Rails core team. # 4:35 pm

Twisted Web in 60 seconds. A common complaint about Twisted is how hard it is to figure out the web stack. Jp Calderon’s tutorial (in nine installments and counting) is the best documentation on web development in Twisted I’ve seen. # 11:48 am

breaking links. Mike complains about sites such as Twitter and WordPress.com which mess around with Ajax and links and hence breaks the ability to command-click to open a new tab in Safari (and Chrome). I just realised that I’ve subconsciously retrained myself to right click and select “open in new tab” to avoid that exact issue. # 8:26 am