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swf Image Replacement. Really neat idea: unobtrusively replace an inline image with a SWF, then apply effects like rotation, rounded corners and drop-shadowns. Shame it suffers from Flash-Of-Unstyled-Content.

# 27th February 2007, 7:51 pm / flash, fouc, javascript, swfir, unobtrusive

OpenID and microformats support on XTech site. “A single-sign on solution like OpenID solves an important problem for us, as most people tend to interact with our conference web sites in only one or two time periods each year.”

# 27th February 2007, 12:46 pm / microformats, openid, xtech

The No-Shit Guide To Supporting OpenID In Your Applications. Fantastically useful: Dan Webb digs through the API documentation so you don’t have to. The example code is for Rails but the PHP and Python libraries work in much the same way.

# 27th February 2007, 1:56 am / dan-webb, openid, rails

Oxford Geek Night 2 call for proposals. The next event is coming up in April. Get your talk proposals in now!

# 27th February 2007, 12:42 am / call-for-proposals, oxford-geek-nights, oxfordgeeks

OpenID makes web identities real and appealing. DHH has caught the OpenID bug. Expect to see a flurry of activity around OpenID in the Rails community over the next few weeks.

# 26th February 2007, 10:31 am / dhh, openid, rails

More on Decentralised Social Networking. Martin Atkins has been thinking hard about the practicalities of building decentralised social networking on top of OpenID.

# 26th February 2007, 10:15 am / martin-atkins, openid

Django snippets. James Bennett’s new site for Django snippets. The source code to the whole site is available.

# 26th February 2007, 10:08 am / django, django-snippets, james-bennett, python

Facebook Query Language. The Facebook API now lets you run SQL-like queries. You can’t do joins but you can perform very simple subselects.

# 25th February 2007, 12:06 pm / apis, facebook, sql, webapis

Flash MP3 Player. Nice little embeddable MP3 player, with support for single files or Atom/XSPF/RSS playlists.

# 25th February 2007, 2:13 am / flash, mp3

Oxford Geeks hit the media! Coverage in the local newspaper and on the radio, with MP3s.

# 25th February 2007, 2:12 am / natalie-downe, oxford, oxford-geek-nights, oxfordgeeks

Camino 1.1 Beta. Camino now has session saving. I simply won’t use a browser that doesn’t have this feature.

# 25th February 2007, 1:16 am / browsers, camino, sessionsaving

Data::ObjectDriver. Benjamin Trott’s Perl ORM, with built in support for both caching and data partitioning. I think this is what Six Apart uses for Vox.

# 25th February 2007, 12:43 am / ben-trott, orm, perl, scaling, sixapart, vox

XTech 2007 schedule: behind the scenes. Expectnation looks like a smart piece of software for conference organisers. There’s surprisingly little crossover with Event Wax—it looks like the two could complement each other nicely.

# 23rd February 2007, 11:25 pm / conferences, edddumbill, eventorganisation, eventwax, expectnation, xtech, xtech2007

PyCon Day 1: OLPC Has Excited me. Did you know that the OLPC machines have a “show source” button?

# 23rd February 2007, 11:21 pm / olpc, pycon, python

Serving YUI Files from Yahoo! Servers (via) If everyone who uses YUI links to the same set of files, your users will already have the YUI code cached in their browser when they arrive on your site.

# 23rd February 2007, 6:45 pm / javascript, yahoo, yui

John Resig: Thoughts on OpenAjax. I hadn’t looked in to OpenAjax—from John’s analysis it seems like they need to make it easier for open-source projects to participate and do a bunch of work to modernise their core library.

# 22nd February 2007, 10:20 pm / ajax, javascript, john-resig, jquery, openajax

prooveme.com. An OpenID provider that uses SSL client certificates (which you install in your browser) for authentication.

# 22nd February 2007, 12:01 pm / certificates, openid, prooveme, ssl

Introducing Windows CardSpace. I incorrectly stated in my talk yesterday that CardSpace was a feature of Vista; it’s actually available for XP as well as part of the .NET 3.0 framework.

# 22nd February 2007, 11:47 am / cardspace, correction, future-of-web-apps, microsoft

A Gathering Of Geeks. The Oxford Mail’s coverage of Nat’s Oxford Geek Night event.

# 22nd February 2007, 9:35 am / local-news, natalie-downe, oxford-geek-nights, oxfordmail

Browser Wars. Doug Crockford is hosting a panel discussion with Chris Wilson from IE, Mike Shaver from Mozilla and Håkon Wium Lie from Opera on February 28th in Sunnyvale.

# 22nd February 2007, 7:53 am / chris-wilson, douglas-crockford, hakonwiumlee, mike-shaver

Wired News: Web Startups Reboot ’London 2.0’. Crikey... the toungue-in-cheek name for our Rails/Django meetups has inspired a Wired article!

# 22nd February 2007, 7:50 am / london2, wired

OpenStreetMap Baghdad. OSM has mapped the streets by tracing from aerial imagery, but needs help with the names of the streets.

# 22nd February 2007, 7:48 am / baghdad, iraq, openstreetmap

Django IRC FAQ. Frequently asked questions from the Django IRC channel.

# 20th February 2007, 10:07 am / django, faq, irc

Geek | Manager. Meri Williams is one of the most productive people I know. This is her new blog on being a manager and a geek at the same time, with plenty of productivity advice.

# 19th February 2007, 10:15 am / geek, manager, meriwilliams, productivity

30 second PyPy tutorial. Zyroth on programming.reddit.com shows how to interactively compile a Python function to C using PyPy and benchmark it against the original.

# 18th February 2007, 9:30 pm / pypy, python

parseDateString function in dateparse.js return wrong date for ’2006-12-31’. I didn’t realise that you have to initialise a JavaScript Date object in a certain order; if you don’t weird bugs can result.

# 17th February 2007, 7:04 pm / date, javascript

Neighbourhood Fix-It. Report problems to your council across the UK. The most detailed Ordinance Survey maps anywhere online, and a superb example of progressive enhancement in action—the maps work without JavaScript, and the site even works without images!

# 17th February 2007, 5:05 pm / barcamplondon2, javascript, maps, matthew-somerville, mysociety, progressive-enhancement

Quick Django Benching. Django under Apache/mod_python outperforms nginx/FastCGI and LightTPD/FastCGI once you ramp up the concurrency levels. My setup for this site (Apache/mod_python behind an nginx proxy, with nginx handling static files) should give the best of both worlds.

# 17th February 2007, 4:56 pm / apache, deployment, django, fastcgi, lighttpd, modpython, nginx

What is The Daily You? New feature from Pegasus News that customises the site based on your browsing history and their detailed taxonomy. Probably useful if you live in Texas, but interesting nonetheless.

# 17th February 2007, 1:12 am / pegasusnews, recommendations

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