Blogmarks
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Sun OpenID IdP: protocol and implementation review. Sun employees are posting lots of useful insights gathered during the implementation of their OpenID provider.
Django GridContainer. Media Temple’s virtualized Django hosting is now accepting applications for beta testers.
robots.txt Adventure. Interesting notes from crawling 4.6 million robots.txt, including 69 different ways in which the word “disallow” can be mis-spelled.
Quechup: Another Social Network Enemy! This is why we need to stop teaching users that it’s OK to give their e-mail username and password to any site that asks for it.
OAuth: Your valet key for the Web. OAuth is a really important new specification that aims to solve the “give this application permission to do X on my behalf” problem once and for all.
The Rubinius Sprint. Sun are throwing a ton of resources at Ruby, because as Tim Bray says, “it’s not fast enough”. Imagine where they’d be if they’d invested this kind of support in Jython five years ago...
Google To “Out Open” Facebook On November 5. “Google will announce a new set of APIs on November 5 that will allow developers to leverage Google’s social graph data. They’ll start with Orkut and iGoogle (Google’s personalized home page), and expand from there to include Gmail, Google Talk and other Google services over time.”
Amazon guide to ripping your CDs. “Many of our customers have already figured out that one cheap way to get DRM-free MP3 files is to buy them on CD and rip them themselves.”
Six Apart: We Are Opening the Social Graph. Six Apart put their cards on the table with respect to the social graph problem—focusing on OpenID, XFN and FOAF as enabling technologies. Be sure to watch the screencast demo of their new social graph visualisation tool.
Want To Learn Web Programming? Write A Blog Engine. I couldn’t agree more. Weblogs are an ideal starter project—simple enough to get your head around, complex enough to teach you a bunch of important lessons, ideally suited for eating your own dog food.
Flickr: [what was with the pirates?] Garrrrhhhh! (via) It’s fascinating reading all the complaints on this thread—partly due to different international senses of humour, and partly just because as Flickr became more mainstream it attracted users who never picked up the sense of fun at the center of the Flickr brand.
Happy Talk Like A Pirate Day. What’s a pirate’s favourite cheese? Cornish Yaaaarg!
ActsAsUndoable. Lawrence Carvalho shows how robust undo functionality can be added to a JavaScript application through careful application of the Memento design pattern.
OpenID event at the British Library. On the 8th of November. Sadly I’ll be in Berlin for the Web 2.0 Expo but it looks like a great lineup. Free to attend but limited to 50 people so book soon.
Webstock 2008—New Zealand’s web conference. I’m speaking next year in New Zealand! Very excited, plan to spend most of February there to make the most of the flights.
Satisfaction signup page. Check out the box on the right: it lets you use hCard to instantly import your public profile data (including a user icon) from Flickr, Twitter, Upcoming and more.
Times to Stop Charging for Parts of Its Web Site. The New York Times finally acknowledges that you can’t be the “paper of record” if no one can link to you.
Jottit. Aaron Swartz’s latest venture: a complete rethink of the Infogami concept. Well worth checking out for the extremely thoughtful way it introduces features, and the way account creation with a password remains optional until you want to add access control.
Opera 9.5 alpha, Kestrel, released. “With history search, Opera creates a full-text index of each and every page you visit, and when you go to the address bar, you can simply start entering words you know have been on pages you’ve visited before, and items matching your search show up.” I just tried this; it’s magic. I’m switching back to Opera from Camino.
virtualenv 0.8.1. Ian Bicking’s tool for creating isolated Python environments; designed to replace his earlier workingenv package. Does anyone have any experience using this? It looks fantastically useful.
Zope3 for Djangoers. I prefer “Djangonauts”, personally. Useful overview of Zope 3 for people with Django experience (first of a multi-part series).
The longdesc lottery. Mark Pilgrim is now writing for the WHATWG blog. Here he makes the case for replacing the longdesc attribute with a better solution, based on ten years of developer ignorance and misuse. As always with that site, check the comments for a microcosm of the larger debate.
html4all. New mailing list / advocacy group focusing on accessibility issues relevant to HTML 5. This is something that the core HTML 5 group have taken a lot of criticism for, although it’s unfair to say that they don’t care about accessibility (they are however challenging a lot of sacred cows).
TechShop: Geek Heaven. Like a fitness club for people who make stuff: a ridiculous amount of exciting hardware (including laser etchers, robotic milling machines and a 3D printer) and trainers on hand to show you how to use it all. Sadly it’s in Menlo Park which is a bit of a trek from Brighton.
How should JSON strings be represented in Erlang? Erlang’s poor support for strings makes this a surprisingly tricky question.
An Introduction to Erlang. Erlang gets the ONLamp tutorial treatment from Gregory Brown.
Audio Fingerprinting for Clean Metadata. Last.fm have started using audio fingerprints to help clean up misspelled artists and duplicate track information.
Restructured Text to Anything. Slick set of online tools for converting Restructured Text (one of the more mature wiki-style markup languages) to HTML or PDF. Includes a nice looking API. Powered by Django.
Silly MS-DOS 5 Promo Video. I can’t decide if this is better or worse than the Windows 386 rap.