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Photo Matt: Act Two. Automattic is an excellent case-study of building a business on top of an open source project.
HTML 5 published as W3C First Public Working Draft! A significant step, almost completely overlooked in the hubbub over IE8.
RSS Duplicate Detection. “Detecting duplicate items in an RSS feed is something of a black art”. I hadn’t realised quite how involved such a basic function of an aggregator could be.
<META HTTP-EQUIV="X-BALL-CHAIN">. Mozilla hacker Robert O’Callahan discusses the technical implications of freezing copies of older rendering engines, including the increased footprint and the terrifying prospect of documents in different rendering modes communicating through iframes and the DOM.
Broken. Jeremy highlights the fly in the ointment: if you want IE 8 to behave like IE 8 (and not pretend to be IE 7), you HAVE to include the X-UA-Compatible header.
The versioning switch is not a browser detect. PPK: “In other words, the versioning switch does not have any of the negative effects of a browser detect.”
Beyond DOCTYPE: Web Standards, Forward Compatibility, and IE8. This has huge implications for client-side web developers: IE 8 will include the ability to mark a page as “tested and compatible with the IE7 rendering engine” using an X-UA-Compatible HTTP header or http-equiv meta element. It’s already attracting a heated debate in the attached discussion.
World’s ugliest Django app. Brilliant hack from Paul Bissex: a self-contained Django application in 70 lines of code which shows off some internals trickery and makes use of a bunch of handy django.contrib packages.
Heavier than Air. Charles Miller points out that every time Apple breaks the mold with a new product (the iPod, the iPod Mini, the iMac and now the MacBook Air) they lose in feature matrix comparisons but win in the marketplace.
Django at PyCon. Unfortunately I’ll be missing US PyCon this year (I’ll be at SxSW and Webstock in New Zealand though)—but it’s great to see that there’s a strong line-up of Django related presentations.
jQuery.ScrollTo (via) Neat jQuery plugin for animated scrolling of both windows and overflow elements.
Telegraph to become OpenID provider (via) “The Telegraph will soon become the first newspaper in the world, and the first British media company, to become an OpenID provider.”. Didn’t see that one coming!
Timber hazard after ship wrecked. A ship went down off the Dorset coast, but its cargo of timber has been washing up all the way along Brighton beach.
Dangers of remote Javascript. Perl.com got hit by a JavaScript porn redirect when the domain of one of their advertisers expired and was bought by a porn company. Nat Torkington suggests keeping track of the expiration dates on any third party domains that are serving JavaScript on your site.
django-evserver. Marek Majkowski got Comet working with Django using a custom WSGI server that wraps libevent using ctypes.
Yahoo! supporting OpenID 2.0 but not 1.1. Yahoo!’s Allen Tom outlines the reasons Yahoo! are supporting OpenID 2.0 but not OpenID 1.1.
Yahoo! OpenIDs are the same for all RPs. I had assumed that Yahoo! would be using directed identity to provide a different OpenID for each user/site combination, to prevent correlation of accounts. I was incorrect; they’re just using it for easier sign-in, with the same auto-generated URL used for every site.
Full Page Zoom Is For Sissies. Ryan points out that sizing everything in ems, while neat, imposes a pretty hefty maintenance cost and is rapidly becoming unnecessary thanks to the page zoom feature in IE 7, Opera and Firefox 3.0.
Flickr Place IDs. flickr.places.find, flickr.places.resolvePlaceURL and flickr.places.resolvePlaceID combine to provide a really useful, lightweight not-quite-a-geocoder API. It’s a shame you can’t search for places by providing a latitude/longitude point yet.
FixMySpine. JP muses over what would happen if huge government IT contracts were handed to small, agile teams like MySociety instead of gargantuan IT consultancies. I’ve often wondered the same thing.
Django Developer Jobs. Just an observation: the Django job market is booming at the moment, with 16 new job ads posted so far this year (that’s nearly one a day). If you want to be paid money to develop in Django there’s never been a better time.
New feature: Blogger as OpenID provider (via) You can now enable your Blogger blog as an OpenID.
Canon EOS Beginners’ FAQ. A really good, detailed FAQ; I just picked up a Canon EOS 400D (aka Digital Rebel XTi) and I’m figuring out what I can do with it. It looks like I’ll need something better than the kit lens for wildlife photography.
.aspx considered harmful. Jon Udell: “I guess I’m extra-sensitive to the .aspx thing now that I work for Microsoft, because I know that to folks outside the Microsoft ecosystem it screams: We don’t get the web.”—he goes on to mention that smart URL rewriting is thankfully built in to the upcoming ASP.NET MVC framework.
8 More Design Mistakes with Account Sign-in (via) Second of a two part series by Jared Spool. I agree with all of them with the possible exception of #15 which advocates providing a non-email password recovery solution. Security “questions” are usually dreadfully insecure, and introduce the need to lock users out of their accounts after just a few tries.
Automate firing of onload events. Paul Irish suggests setting up your site’s onload handlers in a single external JavaScript file then executing different handlers depending on the body element’s id attribute.
openid.yahoo.com. Yahoo!’s human readable guide to OpenID, complete with tour. It looks like they’re relying on the “sign-in seal” to protect against phishing.
Yahoo! Announces Support for OpenID. Here’s the official press release: “Yahoo! Support Triples Number of OpenID Accounts to 368 million”. Directed identity gets a mention; it’s going to be enabled for www.yahoo.com and www.flickr.com. The public beta starts on January 30th.
MacHeist Bundle. Everything’s now unlocked, meaning you can pick up TaskPaper, CSSEdit, Snapz Pro X (excellent for screencasts) and Pixelmator for $49.
Django snippets: “for” template tag with support for “else” if array is empty. A neat solution to a common pattern; I’d personally like to see this included in Django proper.