Simon Willison’s Weblog

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SlideShare: Webapps scalability. Lots of great presentations on scaling, from Twitter, Digg, Vox, LiveJournal, Last.fm and more.

# 4th July 2007, 12:53 am / digg, lastfm, livejournal, scaling, sixapart, slideshare, twitter, vox

Lego Millenium Falcon Stop Motion. This introduced me to a whole world of YouTube Star Wars lego stop motion videos.

# 3rd July 2007, 11:03 pm / animation, lego, milleniumfalcon, starwars, stopmotion, youtube

The Geni “contact us” form. As you type your message, Geni pulls in likely entries from their FAQ using Ajax—with pretty decent results.

# 3rd July 2007, 9 pm / ajax, faq, geni

Google Translate (beta). Google’s beta translator based on statistical analysis of things like the United Nations corpus. I have no idea how long this has been available; it isn’t linked from their homepage.

# 3rd July 2007, 4:43 pm / google, i18n, languages, translation

HTML Entity Character Lookup. Look up HTML entities by characters that are a similar shape.

# 3rd July 2007, 3:41 pm / html, tool, unicode

Gmail and Django. I’d never considered using Gmail to send e-mail from applications, but it could be a useful way of avoiding having outbound e-mail falsely flagged as spam.

# 2nd July 2007, 9:46 pm / django, email, gmail, nathan-ostgard

jQuery Taconite Plugin. Lets you serialize jQuery DOM manipulation commands as an XML document for retrieval via Ajax.

# 2nd July 2007, 6:29 pm / ajax, javascript, jquery, plugins, taconite

Web hosting landscape and mod_wsgi. Graham Dumpleton explains how mod_wsgi’s daemon mode should provide secure Python deployment for commodity hosting providers.

# 2nd July 2007, 3:47 pm / graham-dumpleton, hosting, modwsgi, python, wsgi

Processing Web Documents using Alexa Web Search, Amazon S3 and Amazon EC2. I’m not sure when it happened, but Alexa Web Search can be hooked in to EC2 now—presumably with free bandwidth between the two.

# 1st July 2007, 7:19 pm / alexa, amazon, aws, ec2, s3

dnspython. Python DNS toolkit—seems like the kind of thing that should be in the standard library.

# 1st July 2007, 11:55 am / dns, python

jQuery plugin: Validation. Pretty clever way of attacking the client-side form validation problem; supports both configuration object literals and custom attributes on the form fields themselves.

# 30th June 2007, 10:26 pm / javascript, jquery, plugins, validation

Python, Mac OS X, and Readline. This worked for me, though you need to already have gcc and svn installed. It’s crap like this that made me switch to Ubuntu on Parallels for most of my Python development.

# 30th June 2007, 10:24 pm / macos, parallels, python, rant, readline, ubuntu

Does negative press make you Sicko? (via) Google’s Health Advertising Blog encourages the healthcare industry to buy ads against Sicko as part of an “issue management campaign” to help “educate” the public. Creepy.

# 30th June 2007, 6 pm / creepy, google, healthcare, sicko

Appalachian. “Appalachian is a Firefox add-on that adds the ability to manage and use several OpenIDs to ease the login parts of your browsing experience.”

# 30th June 2007, 1:36 pm / appalachian, firefox, openid, plugins

How to convert a VMWare virtual appliance to work with Parallels. Anyone know the best option for creating a virtual machine that can easily be used by Parallels and VMWare alike?

# 28th June 2007, 10:23 am / parallels, virtualization, vmware

My Google Tech Talk on OpenID. I gave this extended and improved version of my “Implications of OpenID” talk at Google on Monday. Fast turnaround on the video!

# 28th June 2007, 8 am / google, google-video, openid, speaking, my-talks, techtalk

OpenID: Why, how, 37signals. 37signals just enabled OpenID on Basecamp as well as Highrise. This is their excellent attempt at explaining its benefits.

# 28th June 2007, 1:38 am / 37-signals, basecamp, highrise, openid

Django status update: June 26. Outstanding detailed overview of recent happenings in the Django community, courtesy of Clint Ecker.

# 27th June 2007, 2:30 pm / clint-ecker, django

Importing your social network from other sites. Dopplr now does this from GMail, Twitter, vCard or hCard and XFN. I’m convinced that contact import is a killer app for OpenID.

# 26th June 2007, 1:46 am / contactimport, dopplr, gmail, hcard, microformats, openid, twitter, vcard, xfn

3rd Annual Nigerian EMail Conference. “Registration is via a confidential money transfer.”

# 26th June 2007, 1:27 am / funny, spam

Index of /drupal/modules/openid. Drupal’s OpenID implementation in CVS.

# 26th June 2007, 12:26 am / cvs, drupal, openid, php

Drupal 6 and OpenID. “The implementation is all Drupal native code—no third party libraries were used.”

# 26th June 2007, 12:26 am / drupal, openid, php

SELECT * FROM everything, or why databases are awesome. I’m beginning to think that for scalable applications the thinner your ORM is the better—if you even use one at all.

# 22nd June 2007, 12:40 am / blaine-cook, databases, orm, rails, scaling, sql, twitter

The State of Proxy Caching. If you’ve always wondered exactly what intermediate proxies are going to do to your carefully constructed Web application, here’s your answer.

# 21st June 2007, 2:18 pm / caching, http, mark-nottingham, proxies

RESTify DayTrader. Killer REST case study from Joe Gregorio.

# 21st June 2007, 1:44 pm / daytrader, joe-gregorio, rest

Yet another one more thing... a new Web Inspector! I installed the latest nightly but I couldn’t find the inspector (or work out how to turn on the debug menu). Anyone know what I’m doing wrong?

# 21st June 2007, 11:49 am / safari, webkit

The Sarcastic Gamer: MS Surface. “Your next computer will be a big-ass table.”

# 21st June 2007, 11:42 am / funny, microsoft, surface

Years

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