Simon Willison’s Weblog

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Web 2.0 Company Name Generator. I talked to a company recently who had actually used this to come up with a name for one of their products.

# 26th January 2007, 6:38 pm / funny, web2

Opera Skins: Tango CL. This skin is the first thing I install when I set up Opera. It’s an enormous improvement on the default.

# 26th January 2007, 4:16 pm / opera, skin

The Django Book: Deploying Django. Solid advice based on years of experience at the Journal-World and the Washington Post.

# 26th January 2007, 12:38 pm / deployment, django, django-book

Farm subsidies in United Kingdom. Top recipients of EU subsidies in the UK include Tate and Lyle and Nestle—do they really need the money?

# 26th January 2007, 12:07 pm

XForms in Firefox (via) Practical tutorial on taking advantage of the Firefox XForms plugin, sadly not yet bundled with the browser itself.

# 26th January 2007, 9:59 am / firefox, tutorial, xforms, xml

MySpace Allegedly Kills Computer Security Website. No need for the allegedly; it’s been confirmed. MySpace got GoDaddy.com to redirect DNS for seclists.org after a list of phished user accounts posted to the full disclosure mailing list list was archived there.

# 26th January 2007, 9:57 am / dns, godaddy, myspace, phishing, security

Ninja kitten band win Coke battle (via) There’s a headline you don’t expect to see on BBC News.

# 26th January 2007, 1:05 am / bbcnews, humor, joel-veitch, kittens

Justin Mason: more on social whitelisting with OpenID. The author of spam assassin warns that whitelist-based trust networks are a lot harder than they look.

# 26th January 2007, 1:02 am / openid, social-whitelisting, spamassassin

Social whitelisting with OpenID... (plasticbag.org). Tom’s write-up of the social whitelisting idea. Lots of sceptics in the comments.

# 26th January 2007, 1 am / openid, social-whitelisting, spam, tom-coates

The Spotlight File System for MacFUSE (via) Finally, an easy way to create proper virtual folders on OS X using Spotlight and FUSE.

# 25th January 2007, 6:48 pm / fuse, macos, spotlight

Flickr Machine Tags. A new feature for API developers that lets them stuff arbritrary namespaced key/value pairs in to tags and query them using the API. Even without range queries, this will enable a ton of exciting new third party developments.

# 24th January 2007, 7:54 pm / api, flickr, machinetags, tagging

MyOpenID: New anti-phishing tools available. Includes SafeSignIn, which removes the login form from the landing page. You have to enable it in your preferences though.

# 24th January 2007, 3:02 pm / myopenid, openid, phishing, scott-kveton

Pickles Begone. Barry Warsaw’s notes on adding SQLAlchemy persistence to Mailman.

# 23rd January 2007, 1:43 pm / barry-warsaw, mailman, python, sqlalchemy

Stopping spambots with hashes and honeypots. Ned’s analysis of how spambots work, along with some relatively simple tricks that should fool most of them.

# 23rd January 2007, 1:39 pm / commentspam, hashing, ned-batchelder, spam, spambots

Twitter Updater (a WordPress plugin). “The Twitter Updater automatically sends a Twitter status update to your Twitter account when you create, publish, or edit your WordPress post.” Fantastic idea—I really want this for my own site.

# 22nd January 2007, 11:12 pm / plugins, twitter, wordpress

On Space Art in Sebastopol... Awesome. Our giant mosaic space invaders are going to show up on Google Earth!

# 22nd January 2007, 10:44 pm / art, foocamp, google, google-earth, tom-coates

In Which I Think About Java Again, But Only For A Moment. Convincing argument as to why desktop applications written in Java rarely have decent user interfaces.

# 22nd January 2007, 9:39 pm / java, ui, usability

Wikipedia nofollows links. Wikipedia’s high PageRank means this is likely to have a noticable knock-on effect on the rankings of many other sites.

# 22nd January 2007, 7:27 pm / nofollow, pagerank, wikipedia

Oxford Geek Nights. 8pm on the 7th of February 2007 at the Jericho Tavern in Oxford. Three 15 minute talks and a bunch of 5 minute microslots. I’ll be giving a talk on OpenID.

# 22nd January 2007, 7:22 pm / geeknights, openid, oxford, oxford-geek-nights, speaking

Ma.gnolia Blog: OpenID is Taking Off! Since November, 15% of new Ma.gnolia members signed up using an OpenID.

# 22nd January 2007, 6:41 pm / magnolia, openid

Group Membership Protocol. Martin Atkins’ proposal for a simple “is OpenID X a member of group Y?” protocol, useful for whitelists that can scale to handle large numbers of entries.

# 22nd January 2007, 8:27 am / martin-atkins, openid, whitelisting

Subtlety (via) Instantly create an RSS feed from a public subversion repository.

# 22nd January 2007, 8:20 am / rss, subversion, syndication

Anonymous OpenID. A mailinator-style service for OpenID. I’m glad someone’s built this; it reinforces the idea that an OpenID should not be trusted as an account without first using a verification step.

# 21st January 2007, 2:03 am / mailinator, openid

Phishing and OpenID: Bookmarks to the Rescue? Ping extends my proposal to use bookmarks as the principle authentication mechanism, resulting in a system that is much easier for people to understand.

# 21st January 2007, 1:36 am / bookmarks, ka-ping-yee, openid, phishing

Fork JavaScript. A great name for Yet Another JavaScript Library. This one tries to combine the best bits from YUI and Prototype.

# 20th January 2007, 11:39 pm / forkjavascript, javascript, prototype-js, yui

XMPP OpenID server. An OpenID provider that sends you a Jabber message when you try to log in, to help guard against phishing.

# 20th January 2007, 11:24 pm / openid, phishing, xmpp

MonsterID as Gravatar Fallback. Cute monsters created using a trick similar to Don Park’s 9-blocks. I like these more than gravatars.

# 20th January 2007, 11:21 pm / 9blocks, monsterid

Links to academic papers on phishing. Posted to the openid-general list by Mike Beltzner.

# 19th January 2007, 5:32 pm / openid, phishing

TagMaps. The toolkit behind the new YRB World Explorer, available to developers as a reusable Flash component.

# 19th January 2007, 10:01 am / flash, tagmaps, worldexplorer, yrb

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