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Yahoo! Search Contextual Precaching. Neat performance trick on Yahoo! Search: the moment you start typing (indicating you intend to search) the site quietly fires off a bunch of requests to precache assets needed for the search results page.

# 16th November 2007, 3:58 pm / ajaxian, javascript, performance, yahoo, yahoo-search

Taking the canvas to another dimension. Opera have finally released a test version with support for a opera-3d canvas context—Windows only for the moment, but Mac and Linux versions are promised “soon”.

# 16th November 2007, 1:39 pm / 3d, canvas, javascript, opera

CSS3 and the death of Handheld Stylesheets. I hadn’t looked at CSS 3 media queries before (which let you apply different styles based on media features such as screen width, height and colour availability)—they seem like a much smarter solution that handheld stylesheets and also appear to be preferred by device vendors.

# 16th November 2007, 9:53 am / browsers, css3, mediaqueries, mobile, russell-beattie

Ten New Things in WebKit 3. Does “incremental updates for persistent server connections” for XMLHttpRequest mean Safari now has native support for Comet?

# 16th November 2007, 1:19 am / ajax, comet, javascript, safari, safari3, webkit, xmlhttprequest

google-axsjax (via) “The AxsJAX framework can inject accessibility enhancements into existing Web 2.0 applications using any of several standard Web techniques”—including bookmarklets and Greasemonkey. The enhancements conform to W3C ARIA, supported by Firefox 2.0 and later.

# 14th November 2007, 5:18 pm / accessibility, ajax, aria, axsjax, bookmarklets, firefox, google, greasemonkey, javascript, w3c

Django Changeset 6671. Malcolm Tredinnick: “Implemented auto-escaping of variable output in templates”. Fantastic—Django now has protection against accidental XSS holes, turned on by default.

# 14th November 2007, 5:05 pm / autoescaping, django, malcolm-tredinnick, python, security, templating, xss

Django Book Update. It’s done! Went to the printer on Friday, due in bookstores in the second week of December (just in time for Christmas). Congrats to Adrian and Jacob.

# 14th November 2007, 12:59 am / adrian-holovaty, django, django-book, jacob-kaplan-moss, python

JavaScript Method Overloading. John Resig shows a clever trick for overloading JavaScript methods based on the number of arguments, using the little-known .length property of a JavaScript function object.

# 13th November 2007, 2:39 pm / javascript, john-resig, methodoverloading

HTML5 Media Support in WebKit. WebKit continues to lead the pack when it comes to trying out new HTML5 proposals. The new audio and video elements make embedding media easy, and provide a neat listener API for hooking in to “playback ended” events.

# 12th November 2007, 11:21 pm / audio, events, html5, javascript, macos, media, safari, video, webkit

Reinteract—Better interactive Python. Really neat Mathematica-style pygtk interactive prompt for Python, where previous lines can be edited in place and graphs and other graphical primitives can be displayed inline. Includes an elegant plugin mechanism.

# 12th November 2007, 12:55 pm / interactive, mathematica, plugins, pygtk, python, reinteract

Using multiple classes within selectors. Pretty much definitive guide to using multiple classes in a CSS selector, including problems with IE 5 and 6 and one way of addressing them using conditional comments.

# 11th November 2007, 11:07 pm / css-classes, conditionalcomments, css, ie5, ie6, internet-explorer, russweakley

Eye-Fi launches. Really neat idea: a digital camera SD card with built-in WiFi to beam your photos straight to your laptop. SitePen built the UI, which runs in your browser on top of Dojo and talks to a small web server running locally.

# 11th November 2007, 10:40 pm / digital-cameras, dojo, eyefi, javascript, photography, sitepen, wifi

Prism Prototype Now Available on Mac and Linux. Prism is the new name for Mozilla Webrunner, a toolkit for building native desktop applications on top of the Mozilla technology stack.

# 11th November 2007, 10:21 pm / mozilla, prism, webrunner

mochiweb—another faster web server. Bob Ippolito’s latest project: a high performance Erlang web server.

# 9th November 2007, 11:22 pm / bob-ippolito, erlang, mochiweb, webserver

JavaScript Madness: Keyboard Events. Keyboard events in JavaScript are a total pain. This looks like a pretty comprehensive reference to getting them to work cross-browser.

# 9th November 2007, 11:07 pm / crossbrowser, events, javascript, keyboard

Using Time Machine across the network (via) Haven’t tried this tip yet, but apparently “defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1” lets Time Machine back up to a network drive.

# 9th November 2007, 11:04 pm / macos, network, timemachine, unsupported

Pseudo-custom events in Prototype 1.6. Useful tutorial showing how to use Prototype 1.6’s custom events to implement a cross-browser mouse wheel event.

# 9th November 2007, 11:02 pm / andrew-dupont, customevents, javascript, mousewheel, prototype-js

Orbited: The Orbit Event Daemon. HTTP daemon designed for long-lasting comet connections, written in Python using pyevent on top of libevent.

# 9th November 2007, 11:01 pm / comet, http, libevent, pyevent, python

dojo.NodeList API docs. Support in Dojo for jQuery-style chaining operations.

# 8th November 2007, 11:16 am / chaining, dojo, javascript, jquery, libraries

Django documentation bookmarklets. James Bennett continues his month-long series of daily Django tutorials with documentation for one of Django’s best kept secrets: application introspection HTTP headers and bookmarklets that make use of them.

# 8th November 2007, 10:59 am / bookmarklets, django, introspection, james-bennett, python

Announcing Dojo 1.0. The tough learning curve that accompanied 0.4 and earlier has been replaced with an elegant core module (dojo) and two exciting subprojects (dojox and dijit). Well worth a look.

# 7th November 2007, 1:17 pm / dijit, dojo, dojox, javascript

Comet Daily. New regularly updated site covering Comet, the Ajax-like umbrella term for JavaScript server-push techniques. Already a bunch of great stuff on there.

# 7th November 2007, 10:53 am / ajax, comet, cometdaily, javascript

How will OpenID change your site? Excellent introduction to OpenID by Peter Nixey—includes some really nice analogies for explaining both the concept and the implications.

# 7th November 2007, 10:41 am / openid, peter-nixey, thinkvitamin

Gmail Greasemonkey API (via) The new version of Gmail includes API hooks for Greasemonkey script authors. The documentation is by Mark Pilgrim, author of Greasemonkey Hacks.

# 7th November 2007, 10:38 am / gmail, google, greasemonkey, javascript, mark-pilgrim, mihai-parparita

How to make Ajax work for you. Slides from my three hour Ajax tutorial, presented at Web 2.0 Expo Berlin on Monday.

# 7th November 2007, 10:35 am / ajax, javascript, speaking, my-talks, tutorial, web2expoberlin

Hello Revver.com 2.0. Revver, one of the more established video startups, have launched their new version which is powered by Django.

# 2nd November 2007, 7:03 am / django, python, revver, startups, video

Bit Twiddling Hacks. I’ve never been much of a bit twiddler, but I’ve always felt I should learn.

# 2nd November 2007, 6:49 am / binary, bits, bittwiddling, hacks, programming

Papercraft Portal. Maybe we do need a colour printer after all...

# 2nd November 2007, 6:21 am / craft, papercraft, portal, valvesoftware, want

PyObjC 2.0 changes (via) All the good stuff that’s in PyObjC 2.0, released as part of Leopard. According to bbum this is the most significant release of PyObjC in 7 years.

# 2nd November 2007, 6:18 am / bbum, bill-bumgarner, macos, pyobjc, python

The Story Behind ES4. If you’re scratching your head at the recent eruption of acrimony surrounding ECMAScript 4 (the next standardised version of JavaScript) Neil Mix has a relatively easy to follow catch-up post.

# 2nd November 2007, 6:15 am / ecmascript, es4, javascript, neil-mix, standards

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