Blogmarks
Filters: Sorted by date
Django on IronPython. Dino Viehland demonstrated Django running on IronPython and SQL Server at PyCon.
Lessons from mySociety conversion tracking. Neat trick: show the user a “subscribe” form with their e-mail address pre-filled for them and there’s a much higher chance that they’ll click the button.
Firebug + Dijit tips. News to me: Firebug has a magic $1 variable which corresponds to the currently selected node. Very handy.
A brief introduction to Opacity and RGBA. The CSS opacity property is inherited by an element’s children; opacity set using the new rgba() declaration in CSS 3 differs in that it is not inherited.
dojox.gfx demos. Impressive demos of the Dojo 2D drawing APIs—these need to be linked from the dojo site, it took me quite a while to find them.
Clickpass. Peter Nixey’s new OpenID startup has finally launched—does a great job of making OpenID more approachable with a clean, well designed UI and a neat orange button.
Hacking Contributed Models. Neat Django trick using monkeypatching to make some minor tweaks to built-in contributed models such as auth or flatpages.
python4ply tutorial. python4ply is a parser for Python written in Python using the PLY toolkit, which compiles to Python bytecode using the built-in compiler module. The tutorial shows how to use it to add support for Perl-style 1_000_000 readable numbers.
In Response to “What Sucks About Erlang”. Yariv Sadan responds to Damien’s criticism.
What Sucks About Erlang. Damien Katz shares his greatest frustrations from working with Erlang on CouchDB.
IE8 speeds things up. Steve Souders notes that IE8 downloads script files in parallel before executing them sequentially, giving it a significant speed boost over other browsers that download sequentially.
The GigaOM Interview: Mark Zuckerberg. Some interesting titbits on Facebook’s architecture.
Major Update to Prism (via) Mozilla’s site-specific browser tool can now use separate profiles (and hence separate cookie jars) for each instance, making it an excellent tool for protecting yourself against CSRF vulnerabilities in the web applications you rely on.
Windows Live ID Delegated Authentication. Would make life a lot simpler if they just supported OAuth, but at least they include sample code in Python, Ruby and PHP.
Windows Live Contacts API (via) I didn’t realise Microsoft already have a contacts API for Live (which presumably covers hotmail as well).
JavaScript in Internet Explorer 8. John Resig’s analysis. News to me: IE 8 doesn’t support the W3C event model—I had assumed that would be a priority.
Introducing the Google Contacts Data API. Brilliant! (and about time)—now there’s no excuse for asking your users for their Gmail username and password so you can import contacts from their address book. Yahoo! and Microsoft need to catch up on this one fast.
Welcome to Fire Eagle! It’s launched! A service and accompanying API for saving your physical location and selectively sharing it with applications that you trust.
Internet Explorer 8 Readiness Toolkit. The new built-in development tools look similar enough to Firebug to make me very happy. Also of interest: Selectors API (for fast getElementsBySelector), CSS 2.1 support, support for XHTML style namespaces in HTML, an interesting Web Slices feature based on the hAtom microformat and 6 connections per host (up from 2) which should make Comet easier.
Equidistant Objects with CSS. Handy tip; I needed to do this recently and ended up setting everything using pixels. This works much better.
Ward Cunningham’s Visible Workings. Intriguing idea: software that explicitly reveals the underlying business logic in end-user understandable terms. I didn’t find the example very easy to comprehend but the concept is fascinating.
How to Do Anything Photographic (via) A huge collection of excellent looking photography tutorials by Ken Rockwell.
About our maps. Why and how EveryBlock rolled their own maps.
Acid3 is out. The third Acid test, again compiled by Ian Hickson. This one viciously tests DOM Scripting standards compliance and currently exposes flaws in every browser.
CouchDB, XML, and E4X. Brilliant—CouchDB now enables SpiderMonkey’s E4X support, meaning CouchDB views can easily query XML documents stored inside JSON objects using E4X syntax.
Gears 0.2 Released! New modules are HttpRequest and Timer, both for use within workers (which provide Erlang-style message passing concurrency). Particularly interesting is that the Gears HttpRequest module can be used for much cleaner Comet implementations in IE.
xssinterface (via) Clever JavaScript library for implementing opt-in cross-domain messaging in JavaScript (allowing communication between pages and iframes on different domains). Uses HTML 5’s postMessage API if available, otherwise falls back on either Google Gears or a clever cookie hack.
In-Depth django-sphinx Tutorial. Another neat Django extension from the guys at Curse: easy integration with the sphinx full text search engine.
Google Maps Without the Scripting. Google Maps has finally added a simple API for retrieving static map images.
WhatDoTheyKnow (via) New from mySociety: a site for submitting and publically tracking Freedom of Information requests to the UK government.