Simon Willison’s Weblog

jQuery special events. Ben Alman’s comprehensive guide to jQuery’s special events API, which allows you to register new kinds of events that can then be attached and detached using jQuery’s bind and unbind methods. Ben’s clickoutside event is a particularly useful example. # 17th April 2010, 9:08 pm

Showstopper! The Improvised Musical. Went to see this last night with some friends—they really do improvise an entire musical (a surprisingly good one, with catchy new songs and three part harmonies) based entirely on user suggestions. They have shows coming up in Brighton and Bath, thoroughly recommended. # 31st December 2009, 9:36 am

UK Scale Camp. We’re hosting a one day web performance and scalability unconference at the Guardian on the 4th of December. If you’re involved in running a high-scale website in the UK (or abroad) we’d love you to come along. Spaces are going fast. # 4th November 2009, 11:12 pm

Where was the ’editorial viewpoint’ at the News Innovation unconference? Martin Belam points out that a problem with unconferences when applied to audiences outside the technology world is that techies who know how the system operates will inadvertently take over the event, skewing the conversation towards technical topics. Not an insurmountable problem, but one that organisers should probably take in to account. # 17th July 2009, 10:52 am

IanVisits: London Events Calendar. Ian Mansfield maintains a superb calendar of cultural (and geeky) events in London. Lectures, tours, bat walks, film screenings... did you know there’s a Festival of Model Tramways this weekend? # 16th July 2009, 7:22 pm

Special Events in jQuery. How to add a custom “tripleclick” event to jQuery, using the jQuery.event.special extension hook. # 30th March 2009, 10:15 am

EuroDjangoCon. 4th-6th of May 2009, in Prague. Talk submissions are open now, and registration starts on the 6th of February. # 24th January 2009, 6:54 pm

jQuery: Changeset 5990. “Added a new liveQuery/event delegation hybrid method”. Lets you add events that continue to work as new elements are dynamically appended to the DOM, e.g. $(’div p.foo’).live(’click’, fn). Works by adding an event handler to the root document element itself and relying on event bubbling. I have to admit I preferred the earlier proposal of $(’div’).delegate(’p.foo’..), which feels like it should have much better performance—anyone know of a good plugin that supports this? # 23rd December 2008, 12:22 pm

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

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

Freebase Hack Day. I’m finding Freebase increasingly interesting at the moment, and their public hack day on the 8th November in San Francisco looks like it could be a lot of fun. They’ll be previewing Acre, a new server-side JavaScript application platform targeted at building Freebase powered applications. Hit “view source” at the bottom of the hack day site to see what an Acre app looks like. # 24th October 2008, 12:06 am

Mark Zuckerberg speaking at FOWA. The Future of Web Apps Expo is just a few weeks away, and Mark Zuckerberg is the surprise keynote. I’m chairing the developer track again this year. # 24th September 2008, 1:11 pm

DjangoCon & Django 1.0 updates. DjangoCon tickets will be released in two batches of 100. The first set will be available at 12 noon UTC on Thursday July 31st; the second set will be released at 6pm UTC on Friday August 1st. # 30th July 2008, 10:25 am

Oxford Geek Night 7: 25 June 2008. I won’t be able to make this one, but a reminder for anyone in the area that the seventh Oxford Geek Night takes place tomorrow night at the Jericho Tavern. # 24th June 2008, 2:55 pm

Django Users Group London meetup, 19th of May. The inaugural meeting of DJUGL will be on the 19th of May at the Capital Radio building in Leicester Square, sponsored by GCap Media. Three presentations starting at 7pm (I’ll be giving one of them), then on to the pub. Sign up on EventWax; there are only 70 places. # 2nd May 2008, 12:19 pm

Open Tech 2008—5th July in London. Awesome—I still have happy memories of the last Open Tech (back in 2005), very excited about this one. Once again, it’s only a fiver to get in. # 18th March 2008, 1:03 am

Good architectural layering, and Bzr 1.1. Mark Shuttleworth on the growing importance of plug-in architectures as an open source project evolves, as they allow new developers to release their own components without needing commit access to the project. Django is pretty good for this, but more hooks (and a faster event dispatch system) would be useful. # 9th January 2008, 2:06 pm

OGN5: Wednesday February 6, 2008. Great line-up for the next Oxford Geek Night: Rufus Pollock and Denise Wilton. # 19th December 2007, 5:45 pm

Oxford Geek Night 4. Tomorrow night, usual venue. Topics include mySociety, Pylons, MythTV and more. # 27th November 2007, 9:04 pm

HTML5 Media Support in WebKit. WebKit continues to lead the pack when it comes to trying out new HTML5 proposals. The new audio and video elements make embedding media easy, and provide a neat listener API for hooking in to “playback ended” events. # 12th November 2007, 11:21 pm

JavaScript Madness: Keyboard Events. Keyboard events in JavaScript are a total pain. This looks like a pretty comprehensive reference to getting them to work cross-browser. # 9th November 2007, 11:07 pm

Oxford Geek Night #4. November 28th in the upstairs room at the Jericho Tavern; the first one run without Natalie at the helm. # 6th October 2007, 12:33 am

OpenID event at the British Library. On the 8th of November. Sadly I’ll be in Berlin for the Web 2.0 Expo but it looks like a great lineup. Free to attend but limited to 50 people so book soon. # 18th September 2007, 1:22 pm

£5 app. Monthly Brighton meetup for people interested in building (and maybe selling) lightweight software with 1-2 man teams. Nat and I went along last night and really enjoyed it. # 12th September 2007, 12:12 pm

Prototype 1.6.0 release candidate. Prototype gets a long-needed update to its Event API, and some interesting new Function.prototype extensions. # 16th August 2007, 8:49 am

Cabochon event server. Written in Python (on top of SQLObject and Paste), uses JSON for messages, allows event consumers to subscribe with a callback URL. # 2nd August 2007, 8:36 am

Thread Synchronization Mechanisms in Python. Locks, RLocks, Semaphores, Events and Conditions as explained by Fredrik Lundh. # 29th July 2007, 9:32 pm

Oxford Geek Night 3 now on the 25th July. The date has been moved back by a week. # 4th June 2007, 9:49 pm

Oxford Geek Night 3 (via) The date for your diary is July 25th (moved from the 18th). # 2nd June 2007, 12:38 am

d.Construct 2007 is go! One of my favourite UK events. This year’s theme is “Designing the User Experience”. # 21st May 2007, 12:15 pm