Blogmarks
Filters: Sorted by date
Django vs feedparser on dates. Some useful tips in the comments. I find Python’s timezone stuff endlessly frustrating: I know it can do what I want, but it always takes me a ridiculously long time to figure out the necessary incantations.
Wikipedia trust colouring (with demo) (via) “The text background of Wikipedia articles is colored according to a value of trust, computed from the reputation of the authors who contributed the text, as well as those who edited the text.”
What’s New in Python 3.0. They’re definitely taking advantage of the break in backwards compatibility—lots of niggling inconsistencies are finally being cleaned up.
Webistrano. Web based interface for managing Capistrano deployments. Cal recommends having a “deploy to live site” button in his book; this looks like an easy way to build that.
Python 3.0a1 released. Wow, that was a pretty fast turnaround. Betas are planned for 2008, with a final release scheduled for August.
They promised us jetpacks, too. Ben Hammersley points out that the recent flying car story has done the rounds many times before. I’m sure I remember it from my childhood.
XFML (via) Throwing the new home for the XFML specification some Google juice; the domain name got nabbed by a squatter.
Ganeti (via) New from Google (developed in the Zurich office): virtual server management tool designed to “facilitate cluster management”, built on top of Xen.
Long pages work. And thanks to Pay Per Click advertising, splitting an article over multiple pages to get more ad impressions doesn’t make sense any more.
Thoughts on (and pics of) the original Macintosh User Manual. “[I] was struck by how it had to explain a total paradigm shift in interacting with computers”.
Google Web Toolkit: Towards a better web. Good overview of why GWT exists, but I take exception to the title: requiring JavaScript to even display something does not make the web “better”.
A Django Cache Status. Django view to display stats pulled from your memcached server.
Why the Alt Attribute May Be Omitted. “The benefit of requiring the alt attribute to be omitted, rather than simply requiring the empty value, is that it makes a clear distinction between an image that has no alternate text (such as an iconic or graphical representation of the surrounding text) and an image that is a critical part of the content, but for which not alt text is available.”
BCS Oxfordshire: 2007/8 Programme. Need to get these in to Upcoming and tagged for oxfordgeeks.net.
jQuery 1.1.4: Faster, More Tests, Ready for 1.2. The backwards compatibility policy for 1.2 is pretty clever: provide a plugin that restores removed functionality (such as XPath selectors).
Building a JavaScript Library. Slides from John Resig’s Google Tech Talk. Some great tips in here, including: make your APIs orthogonal, look for common patterns, keep things extensible and write the documentation yourself.
Brad Neuberg’s Personal Research Agenda. Inspiring; lots of interesting problems to solve. I also liked the idea of moving to Thailand during a tech downturn and hacking on interesting projects while spending $200/month on living costs.
Satchmo 0.5 Release. Django powered e-commerce application, “the webshop for perfectionists with deadlines”.
The Shrinking Python Web Framework World. Python used to suffer from a paradox of choice with regards to Web frameworks; today things are considerably easier for new developers.
Live Query jQuery plugin. Ingenious plugin that lets you register jQuery event bindings to be executed when a new element matching the provided selector is added to the DOM. Performance is kept snappy by only running the check after a jQuery DOM manipulation method has been executed (append, prepend, attr etc); it won’t notice elements added using regular DOM methods.
Django and the iPhone tutorial. How to install SSH, Python and Django on your iPhone and get Django running against the call database. Less complicated than I expected.
H.264 support coming to the Flash player. It looks like this is a response to the higher video quality offered by Silverlight. I wonder if YouTube knew about this when they started transcoding their videos to H.264 for the Apple TV and iPhone.
XRAY now works in IE. Westciv’s smart CSS debugging bookmarklet now works in IE 6.
An update on Google Video feedback. Google are now offering a real refund to everyone who bought a video, and are letting people keep the Google Checkout credit as well. Purchased videos will keep working for six months.
BBC Olinda digital radio: Social hardware. Schulze and Webb made a social radio prototype for the BBC; the IPR will be under an attribution license so manufacturers can run with it without asking for permission first.
Some thoughts on Mahalo. Rich Skrenta with notes on running a large site that lives and dies by SEO traffic.
Bust A Name. Smart Ajax powered domain search; you give it some words, it shows you available combinations. It’s still almost impossible to find something that doesn’t suck though.
E-Voting Ballots Not Secret; Vendors Don’t See Problem. “You know things are bad when questions about a technical matter like security are answered by a public-relations firm.”
BabelDjango. Tools for integrating Christopher Lenz’s Babel i18n framework with Django.
Skype: What happened on August 16. Windows Update caused a massive global reboot, which destabilised Skype’s peer to peer network due to the flood of log-in requests.