Simon Willison’s Weblog

Techa Kucha Night. Tonight. I’m doing one on Functional Programming and JavaScript.

# 25th July 2006, 11:50 am

httplib2.py. Joe Gregorio’s better HTTP library for Python.

# 25th July 2006, 11:49 am

The Anti-Web 2.0. Gina Trapani questions the wisdom of only saving your data to the cloud.

# 25th July 2006, 11:49 am

Python API for Akismet. My hand-rolled spam prevention works pretty well, but I might give this a try.

# 25th July 2006, 11:47 am

Unit testing asynchronous JavaScript. A better testing API for JavaScript.

# 25th July 2006, 11:46 am

XML-RPC servers using Django. Another advantage of the simple Request/Response model.

# 23rd July 2006, 9:15 pm / django, xml-rpc

Spry Data Set and Dynamic Region Overview. This looks surprisingly clever and well designed.

# 20th July 2006, 2:40 pm

Spry framework for Ajax. Another take on declarative Ajax, this time from Adobe.

# 20th July 2006, 2:29 pm

Buy A Customized Jessica Simpson MP3 At Yahoo! Music. The fact that it’s an MP3 should cause waves.

# 20th July 2006, 1:22 am

Web App Follies: Keep Sites Running Smoothly By Avoiding These 10 Common ASP.NET Pitfalls. Holy cow, ASP.NET is complicated.

# 19th July 2006, 5:08 pm

AOL Retention Manual Revealed—37 signals take note. That’s why AOL developed, “Keep It Real”...a set of principles that will drive a world-class Member experience...

# 19th July 2006, 8:01 am

Paying the top DIGG/REDDIT/Flickr/Newsvine users (or “$1,000 a month for doing what you’re already doing.”). Jason Calacanis stirs things up again. Why work for free?

# 19th July 2006, 7:53 am

Must Ignore vs. Microformats (via) Interesting perspective from Elliotte Rusty Harold.

# 19th July 2006, 7:52 am

Ten Things Yahoo! Is Already Doing with the YUI Library. A good answer to a Frequently Asked question.

# 18th July 2006, 11:18 pm

ruby_blocks.py. Ian Bicking’s port of Ruby style blocks to Python using decorators.

# 18th July 2006, 10:25 pm

Instant inlining of C/C++ in Python. Really neat API, but depends on SWIG.

# 18th July 2006, 9:56 pm

MySpace parser. Tom Dyson’s Python library for screen scraping MySpace profiles, based on Beautiful Soup.

# 18th July 2006, 2:53 pm

Ruby Style Adding Methods to Existing Classes in Python? What’s the best way of doing this?

# 18th July 2006, 9:12 am

How Shellcodes Work. Surprisingly accessible considering the level of detail.

# 18th July 2006, 7:03 am

S5 Project. Ryan King is running a community development process around Eric Meyer’s S5.

# 18th July 2006, 6:33 am

TracDev/UnicodeGuidelines. How the Trac developers handle unicode. Includes a good Python-Unicode introduction.

# 18th July 2006, 6:20 am

L.A. News Service Sues YouTube Over Beating Video. The first lawsuit with tags (an “idiosyncratic choice of descriptive terms”) as a key concept?

# 18th July 2006, 5:40 am

How the myspace SWF hack worked. If Flash is a vector for XSS, is this the end of Flash badges?

# 17th July 2006, 6:04 pm / flash, myspace, swf, xss

Driving Mum and Dad Mad—Video. I sat next to this kid on the train last night. He was quite sweet. Glad he was unarmed though...

# 17th July 2006, 5:39 pm

CouchSurfing—Participation. Community barn-raising brought back the site after a total backup failure.

# 17th July 2006, 10:07 am

YUI Library Release 0.11. Forgot to link this last week. Highlights include colour animation and a logger control.

# 17th July 2006, 8:28 am

Carousel Component—Documentation. Bill Scott’s latest widget.

# 17th July 2006, 8:12 am

The Right Way to do Ajax is Declaratively. I wouldn’t say it’s the only right way, but it’s definitely a useful concept.

# 17th July 2006, 8:11 am

Xooglers: This word just in…. Insider insight on the Google-as-a-verb story.

# 13th July 2006, 12:39 am

BackgrounDRb (via) Easy back-end daemons for your Rails apps. Django needs this.

# 10th July 2006, 4:46 pm / rails