Simon Willison’s Weblog

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Disambiguated URLs with Ruby on Rails. Using before_filter to remove trailing slashes and a few lines of lighttpd configuration to kill the www.

# 24th July 2007, 3:18 pm / disambiguated, lighttpd, nowww, rails, urls

One App, One User Account and Multiple OpenIDs. Dr Nic on allowing many OpenIDs to be associated with a single account.

# 22nd July 2007, 9:42 pm / nic-williams, openid, rails

Building Brickslayer. New tutorial from Michal Wallace on building games in JavaScript using Prototype.

# 22nd July 2007, 9:28 pm / brickslayer, javascript, michal-wallace, prototype-js, tutorial

Undelete in Django. Inspired by the conversation about undo the other day, Nathan Ostgard created a simple solution based around custom managers and a trashed_at model field.

# 20th July 2007, 6:54 pm / custommanagers, django, nathan-ostgard, orm, python, undelete, undo

mod_proxy_balancer gets a thumbs up. Chris Miles explains mod_proxy_balance’s hot spare feature. nginx doesn’t appear to support this, unless I’ve missed something in the documentation.

# 20th July 2007, 5:44 pm / apache, chris-miles, modproxybalance, nginx

Announcing Babel. Impressive new Python i18n / l10n package, with improved message extraction and a huge amount of bundled locale data.

# 20th July 2007, 12:20 pm / babel, christopher-lenz, cldr, i18n, l10n, locale, python, unicode

Friends, Followers, and Notifications. Twitter drops the confusing distinction between “friend” and “follow”—now it’s just “follow”. The less sites that demand I reduce friendship to a binary decision the better.

# 20th July 2007, 10:59 am / friending, social-networks, twitter

Seasoning Templates. “Designing a template language is a lot like seasoning a dish; there’s a whole range of tastes out there.”

# 19th July 2007, 6:04 pm / django, jacob-kaplan-moss, templates

Personal names around the world. I’ve always felt slightly uncomfortable about firstname/lastname fields in forms. Now I know why.

# 19th July 2007, 12:54 pm / forms, i18n, richard-ishida

MOO Stickers. Launched today (party this evening). 90 stickers in a book for a fiver seems very reasonable indeed.

# 19th July 2007, 12:14 pm / moo, stickers

Wikispaces OpenID Support. You can create new accounts there, but they haven’t hooked up association with existing accounts yet (that’s coming soon).

# 19th July 2007, 9:23 am / openid, wiki, wikispaces

Logic in Templates. I don’t think it would hurt Django to have a bit more support for conditional logic in templates, but I wouldn’t go as far as supporting the ability to call Python functions directly.

# 19th July 2007, 8:35 am / christopher-lenz, django, logic, python, templates

A Recipe for OpenID-Enabling Your Site. Detailed guide to setting your site up as an OpenID consumer from Plaxo, who just launched their OpenID implementation. It basically describes the design I’m using for the next release of django-openid.

# 18th July 2007, 7:50 am / django, djangoopenid, openid, plaxo, tutorial

CSRF Redirector. Smart tool for testing CSRF vulnerabilities, by Chris Shiflett.

# 18th July 2007, 7:45 am / chris-shiflett, csrf, security

19 Eponymous Laws Of Software Development. I normally loathe anything that’s bundled up as a numbered list, but this one is actually really useful.

# 18th July 2007, 12:29 am / lists, programming

How Top Bloggers Earn Money. Interesting numbers on BoingBoing, I can has Cheezburger, TechCrunch and more.

# 17th July 2007, 11 pm / blogging, boingboing, icanhascheezburger, money, techcrunch

Conflicting Absolute Positions. Neat technique, although it uses CSS expressions for IE compatibility so it may break down in IE 5 and 6 when JavaScript is disabled.

# 17th July 2007, 10:44 pm / a-list-apart, css, internet-explorer, javascript, rob-swan

A look back: Bram Cohen vs Linus Torvalds. Makes the case that Git has proved Linus Torvald correct on every point of his infamous debate with Bram Cohen back in 2005.

# 17th July 2007, 10:29 pm / 2005, bram-cohen, debate, git, linus-torvalds, version-control, wincent-colaiuta

Just what web server should be sitting in front of my Rails application? Includes some interesting notes about Varnish, PHK’s high performance, highly configurable front-end caching server (essentially a much more modern version of Squid).

# 17th July 2007, 1:29 pm / jason-hoffman, joyent, nginx, phk, rails, squid, varnish

Made in China. Bunnie Huang’s fascinating series on manufacturing in China, based on his experience with Chumby.

# 17th July 2007, 11:48 am / bunnie-huang, china, chumby

Never use a warning when you mean undo. The abundance of “undo” is one of my favourite things about Gmail. I wonder if there’s anything Django could do to make implementing undo functionality easier...

# 17th July 2007, 11 am / a-list-apart, django, gmail, undo, usability, warning

Understanding Engineers: Feasibility. Charles Miller provides smart definitions of what programmers mean when they say “impossible”, “trivial”, “unfeasible”, “non-trivial”, “hard” and “very hard”.

# 17th July 2007, 10:24 am / charles-miller, hard, language, nontrivial, programmers, programming, trivial, unfeasible, veryhard

ThingDB. Another extensible key/value pair data store, constructed for the Open Library based on Aaron Swartz’s Infogami technology.

# 17th July 2007, 10:21 am / aaron-swartz, infogami, openlibrary, postgresql, python, thingdb

Low Pro Behaviours 101. A neatly packaged method of enhancing an existing DOM element with pre-packaged behaviours.

# 17th July 2007, 10:09 am / behaviours, dan-webb, dom, javascript, lowpro, prototype-js

Python Tuples are Not Just Constant Lists. “The index in a tuple has an implied semantic”.

# 17th July 2007, 7:53 am / james-tauber, python, tuples

About Us (The Open Library). I’m a complete sucker for massively ambitious “make the world a better place” projects. Let’s hope this one has legs.

# 16th July 2007, 11:40 pm / openlibrary

Die, Marker Felt, Die! How to replace Marker Felt in the iPhone notes application with Helvetica, via some hackery with jailbreak, MacFUSE and iphonedisk. By the time they arrive in the UK it looks like they’ll have been hacked wide open.

# 16th July 2007, 10:50 pm / apple, helvetica, iphone, iphonedisk, jacob-kaplan-moss, macfuse

lwqueue. Lightweight cross-language message queue system, written in Perl with client libraries in Perl, Python and Ruby.

# 16th July 2007, 10:04 am / lightweight, lwqueue, perl, peter-cooper, python, queue, ruby

Lithuania 2007 set on a Map. Nat has painstakingly geotagged 285 photos from our trip to Lithuania.

# 15th July 2007, 10:17 pm / flickr, flickrmaps, geotagging, lithuania, natalie-downe, travel, vilnius

A great two years. The first public release of Django was tagged in Subversion two years ago today.

# 15th July 2007, 9:53 pm / anniversary, django

Years

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