Blogmarks
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Shadowmaker. Upload a PNG with a transparent background and get back a shadow image suitable for use with the Google Maps API.
ErlyWeb vs. Ruby on Rails EC2 Performance Showdown. ErlyWeb’s peak response rate beats Rails by 47x, albeit with a hugely simplified benchmark. More interesting than the results is the idea of using EC2 for benchmarking on identical simulated hardware.
Updates to template_utils. James Bennett’s Django template_utils library now provides tags for consuming external RSS and Atom feeds. Combine with template fragment caching for an instant mashup written just using templates.
Django snippets: Authenticate against Active Directory. Uses a custom authentication backend with the Python ldap module. If Django hasn’t seen the user before a new Django user account is created with data from ldap.
A Fair Proxy Balancer for Nginx and Mongrel. nginx uses round robin for proxying by default; this extension module ensures requests are queued up and sent through to backend mongrel servers that aren’t currently busy. I don’t see any reason this wouldn’t work with servers other than mongrel.
Insert Dojo and YUI bookmarklets. Combine with Jash for interactive API experimentation on any web page.
Jash: JavaScript Shell (via) An advanced JavaScript interactive shell bookmarklet that works in IE, Firefox, Opera and Safari.
Back To The Future of Print. Nat’s contribution to 24 ways: a long needed update on the state of the art in print stylesheets.
Thai personal names (via) “Family names were allocated to families systematically and the use of family names is still controlled by the government. Any two people in Thailand with the same family name are related.”
JavaScript Internationalisation, explained by reindeer. “Santa even spooked Comet recently by talking about him as if he were some pushy web server.”
Negative numbers in the Google Chart API. Stuart has some ingenious tricks for showing negative values on Google Charts, based on transforming the data to positive values and then relabeling the axes.
Google Chart API Revisited. Marty does some more digging.
James Henstridge: OpenID 2.0. Excellent description of the new features in OpenID 2.0, including a clear explanation of directed identity and attribute exchange.
Blogmaker, a free blogging app for Django (via) “Blogmaker is a full-featured, production-quality blogging application for Django. It supports trackbacks, ping and comments with moderation and honeypot spam prevention.”
Thanks to OpenID and OAuth, the Open Social Web is Beginning to Emerge. My blog’s OpenID powered watchlist and “your comments” features got a write-up on Wired! Nice to know that someone has noticed them.
DiSo: Distributed Social Networking applications (via) New project to prototype a decentralised social network on top of WordPress, using OpenID, microformats and social whitelisting.
Google Chart API (via) Really neat charting API from Google—simply encode your chart data and configuration options in to a URL and Google will serve up a nicely rendered PNG. No API key required. It’s like a documented version of the Google Groups rounded corners API.
CouchDB Roundup. The CouchDB project is interested in contributions from people who can write a large file driver for Erlang, help figure out the CouchDB security model and build scripts to help benchmark performance, scalability and reliability.
Conversation with Bill Gates about IE8 and Microsoft Transparency. Molly asks the tough questions about IE8—it looks like there should be a lot of IE8 material at MIX08 next year.
OpenID 2.0 Final(ly)! Launched at the Internet Identity Workshop. The most interesting feature is probably directed identity, which goes a long way to solving some of the usability issues involved in users having to enter their own URLs.
YUI 2.4.0 released. Lots of great new features, but the one I’m most excited about is Selector: YUI finally has a CSS query engine.
Django Basic Apps. Nathan Borror has released a suite of simple, reusable Django applications: Basic Blog, Basic Places, Basic People, Basic Library and Basic Profiles.
Call for Participation for XTech 2008. XTech 2008 will be in Dublin, Ireland from the 6th to the 9th of May. Lots of really interesting topics in the CfP (OpenID, OAuth, Comet, CouchDB...)—deadline for submissions is the 25th of January.
xkcd: Python. Just type “import antigravity”.
OAuth Core 1.0. The final spec. Expect to see this crop up all over the place in the next few months.
The D Language and Server Logs. Neat example of a simple D program for crunching log files.
Datejs—A JavaScript Date Library. Building a date API around chaining—Date.today().next().thursday()—is a neat concept. I’d like to see that adapted for Python’s datetime library.
First Notes on Django. Cool, the IETF are developing internal tools with Django.
Perl on Rails—Why the BBC Fails at the Internet. Depressing explanation of how the BBC’s decision to outsource its technical infrastructure to Siemens has resulted in severe technology limitations, including the need for everything to run on Perl 5.6 (5.8 came out in 2002).
Why the h can’t Rails escape HTML automatically? It would be a pretty huge change, but auto-escaping in Rails 2.0 could close up a lot of accidental XSS holes.