Simon Willison’s Weblog

Yahoo! Query Language Console. Neat developer tool for playing around with YQL. # 13th December 2008, 9:39 am

YQL—converting the web to JSON with mock SQL. YQL just got a whole lot more interesting to me—I had no idea they were exposing an HTML and RSS scraping tool over a JSONP API in addition to all of the Yahoo! web service methods. # 13th December 2008, 9:39 am

Freebase Sets (via) Give it some topics and it will tell you what they have in common and show further topics matching the same rules. Kind of like the old Google Labs sets tool but this one shows its workings. # 13th December 2008, 9:26 am

Extending jQuery’s selector capabilities. I already knew this was possible, but the examples James Padolsey provides are eye-opening—I especially like his clever :data selector extension which lets you write CSS selectors that query against jQuery’s custom “data” DOM element storage in a manner similar to CSS2 attribute selectors. # 12th December 2008, 6:05 pm

Facebook’s new signup process. It looks like they’ve dropped the “enter your password twice” pattern. Is this really a good idea? I suppose if people mis-type it they can always use forgotten password to set a new one. # 12th December 2008, 11:43 am

lxml: an underappreciated web scraping library. I just wish I could get the wretched thing to install on OS X Leopard without resorting to MacPorts. # 11th December 2008, 9:54 am

Spock Proxy. A MySQL Proxy fork (no Lua) that concentrates solely on sharding, by parsing incoming SQL statements and redirecting them across multiple databases. There are some limitations on the SQL that can be handled (no nested queries, joins across a maximum of two tables) but generally it looks pretty impressive. # 11th December 2008, 9:49 am

Visual Event. External code loading bookmarklet that visualises the JavaScript events hooked up to the current page, and lets you view the source code of the event handling function for each one. Only works for events added by jQuery, YUI or MooTools since those libraries maintain a cache of event handlers that they add, to work around the standard DOM’s omission of handler introspection. # 10th December 2008, 3:38 pm

Conern over London parks vote. London is allocating 4 million pounds to improve parks around the city based on the results of an internet vote. Tom Steinberg: “Anyone in my team could knock up a script to vote with plausible looking data thousands of times, in about 30 minutes.” # 9th December 2008, 1:25 pm

BBC Programmes iPhone webapp experiment. More clever BBC hackery from Duncan Robertson, a really classy iPhone web app for viewing the BBC’s TV schedules, built against the BBC Programmes API with source code available. # 8th December 2008, 6:21 pm

Ubuntu and Debian AMIs for Amazon EC2. Exactly what it says on the tin. # 8th December 2008, 6:04 pm

Noncontiguous area cartograms. a.k.a. really funky data visualisation maps. Includes lots of examples, plus ActionScript 3 source code. # 8th December 2008, 6:03 pm

ptth (Reverse HTTP) implementation in a browser using Long Poll COMET. Donovan Preston experiments with the cleverly named idea of ptth, where servers send HTTP requests to clients. # 8th December 2008, 5:22 pm

Kapow SMS Gateway. Looks like a solid provider for sending and receiving SMS messages, with APIs provided over both e-mail and HTTP in both directions. # 8th December 2008, 5:05 pm

OurDelta Builds for MySQL (via) A community supported “alternative distro” of MySQL, incorporating new features from Google and other sources by maintaining a clean set of patches against the MySQL source tree (which I guess is why it’s not considered a fork). I recognise some of the patches from the excellent “High Performance MySQL, 2nd Edition”. # 8th December 2008, 4:20 pm

How I Use TextMate. “Ack in Project” is a brilliant replacement for TextMate’s disappointing single threaded “Find in Project” feature. # 6th December 2008, 10:32 am

pyquery. “A jQuery-like library for Python”—implemented on top of lxml, providing jQuery style methods for manipulating an HTML or XML document. # 6th December 2008, 9:53 am

Warcraft account security. Apparently Blizzard have been selling two factor authentication key fobs for World of Warcraft for about six months. # 6th December 2008, 9:52 am

What’s New In Python 3.0. Lots. # 4th December 2008, 12:40 pm

Python 3.0. “We are pleased to announce the release of Python 3.0 (final), a new production-ready release, on December 3rd, 2008.” # 4th December 2008, 12:38 pm

Secret Geek A-Team Hacks Back, Defends Worldwide Web. Wired’s take on the story of Dan Kaminsky’s breaking-the-internet DNS vulnerability. Horrible headline. # 3rd December 2008, 11:10 am

Getting OpenID Into the Browser. David Recordon makes the case for online identity management as a key browser feature (I like the “your browser is currently locked” concept), and argues that Gears is in a great position to deliver it. # 3rd December 2008, 10 am

24 ways: User Styling. The web geek advent calendar is up and running again this year, with a striking new design. # 3rd December 2008, 9:08 am

Internet explorer mystery #1376. IE executes function definitions inside an “if (0)” block. That frightens me. # 3rd December 2008, 9:04 am

Amazon SimpleDB a complete flop? Terry asks if anyone is actually using SimpleDB (related Google searches indicate not, and I’ve personally not heard of anyone using it despite plenty of usage of S3 and EC2). One factor might be that lock-in to EC2 and S3 is pretty small, but if you rely on SimpleDB you’ll need to rewrite your entire application to escape. # 2nd December 2008, 10:17 am

Dopplr: New city pages, with public tips and Creative-Commons-licenced, Flickr-powered goodness. Explains why I’ve been unable to convince any of the Dopplr crew to come out and do fun things for the past month. # 1st December 2008, 12:43 am

Live Piracy Map. That’s a heck of a lot of (real, nasty, sea-faring) pirates. # 1st December 2008, 12:29 am

Magic/Replace. More inspirational magic from the team at Dabble DB. Be sure to watch the (short) demo video. # 1st December 2008, 12:23 am

Skillswap goes Portable. Skillswap Brighton will be addressing OAuth and Data Portability on Wednesday. I’m annoyed to be missing it. # 21st November 2008, 10:25 am

Fort Clonque. Nat and I are heading here for a week of offline holiday. Back on the 28th. # 21st November 2008, 7:51 am