Simon Willison’s Weblog

URL Design. Thoughtful tips on modern URL design, from GitHub designer Kyle Neath. GitHub has the best designed URLs of any application I can think of. # 31st December 2010, 10:03 am

Audio Sprites (and fixes for iOS). Remy Sharp on the limitations of HTML5 audio support in iOS. # 23rd December 2010, 8:04 pm

OpenCorporates (via) “The Open Database Of The Corporate World”—a URL for every UK company. # 22nd December 2010, 11:52 am

HotQueue. A super-simple Python work queue using Redis. The API is neat, and makes clever use of generators for blocking consumption of queue items. # 22nd December 2010, 11:51 am

Instapaper requiring email and passwords for new accounts. Instapaper are changing from their novel “enter a username or email address, only enter a password if you really want one” registration scheme to a more traditional email and password required model. Messing with registration forms is a risky business—in this case, the non-obvious support issues that resulted were a net negative. # 15th December 2010, 8:35 pm

24 ways: Extreme Design. Hannah Donovan on the design process that has evolved from multiple /dev/fort expeditions. # 10th December 2010, 10:08 am

Spacelog: space exploration stories from the original transcripts. The product of the most recent /dev/fort outing—a beautiful, web-native interface for browsing the NASA transcripts from the Apollo 13 and Mercury 6 missions (more to come). Every key moment has a URL. # 10th December 2010, 10:07 am

Tracking Every Release. How Etsy use Graphite to monitor their continuous deployment releases. # 10th December 2010, 10:04 am

Indexing JSON in Solr 3.1. The next release of Solr will support indexing documents provided as JSON—Solr currently requires incoming documents to be formatted as XML. # 10th December 2010, 9:46 am

Google and Microsoft Cheat on Slow-Start. Should You? Fascinating optimisation tricks by some of the big websites, which violate the RFC governing the TCP slow-start algorithm in order to perform better in the common case. # 3rd December 2010, 7:03 pm

Google Maps and Label Readability. Obsessively detailed analysis of exactly what makes Google Maps so readable when compared to Yahoo! and Bing. # 3rd December 2010, 5:08 pm

Find conferences to speak at with Lanyrd. We just launched calls for participation on Lanyrd. You can list calls for any conference, browse them by topic, and subscribe to an Atom feed of calls for your area of interest. # 24th November 2010, 2:38 am

gzip support for Amazon Web Services CloudFront. This would have saved me a bunch of work a few weeks ago. CloudFront can now be pointed at your own web server rather than S3, and you can ask it to forward on the Accept-Encoding header and cache multiple content versions based on the result. # 12th November 2010, 5:33 am

Porting Flickr to YUI 3: Lessons in Performance (at YUIConf 2010). Some very interesting tips here. The new Flickr photo pages suffered from what I’ve been calling “Flash of Un-Behavioured Content”, where slow loading JavaScript results in poor behaviour from some UI controls. They started using “Action Queueing”, where a small JS stub ensures a loading indicator is shown for clicks on features that have not yet fully loaded. Also, it turns out some corporate firewalls (Sonicwall in particular) dislike URLs over 1600 characters, and filter out any URL with xxx in it. # 10th November 2010, 6:33 pm

Building a GeoIP server with ZeroMQ. ZeroMQ makes it trivially easy to write a network service in raw C that makes functionality from a C library (in this case the MaxMind GeoIP library) available to clients written in many different client languages. # 9th November 2010, 9:36 am

A predictable web of data—the why of YQL. Christian Heilmann is moving from Yahoo! to Mozilla to head up their evangelism team, and has marked the occasion by releasing the first chapter of a proposed book on YQL. # 30th October 2010, 7:44 am

WebKit is Dropping HTML5 “popstate” Events (via) Really nasty bug with WebKit’s pushState support, discovered by Ben Cherry from Twitter. popState events get dropped if the user navigates while an outbound network request is in progress. # 30th October 2010, 7:41 am

Running Yahoo! Pipes on Google App Engine. “The pipe2py package can compile a Yahoo! Pipe into pure Python source code, or it can interpret the pipe on-the-fly”—makes smart use of Python generators, and comes with tools to run the resulting compiled code on Google App Engine. # 30th October 2010, 12:11 am

mrjob: Distributed Computing for Everybody. Yelp use MapReduce with Hadoop (running on Amazon’s EMR service) to power all sorts of interesting features on the site, including spelling suggestions, review highlights, top searches and “people who viewed X also viewed...”. mrjob is their new open source Python framework for writing MapReduce jobs against the Hadoop streaming API. # 29th October 2010, 11:55 pm

Using MySQL as a NoSQL—A story for exceeding 750,000 qps on a commodity server. Very interesting approach: much of the speed difference between MySQL/InnoDB and memcached is due to the overhead involved in parsing and processing SQL, so the team at DeNA wrote their own MySQL plugin, HandlerSocket, which exposes a NoSQL-style network protocol for directly calling the low level MySQL storage engine APIs—resulting in a 7.5x performance increase. # 27th October 2010, 11:10 pm

Bees with machine guns! Low-cost, distributed load-testing using EC2. Great name for a useful project—Bees with machine guns is a Fabric script which fires up a bunch of EC2 instances, uses them to load test a website and then spins them back down again. # 27th October 2010, 11:04 pm

Bleach, HTML sanitizer and auto-linker. HTML sanitisation is notoriously difficult to do correctly, but Bleach (a Python library) looks like an excellent effort. It uses the html5lib parsing library to deal with potentially malformed HTML, uses a whitelist rather than a blacklist and has a neat feature for auto-linking URLs that is aware of the DOM (so it won’t try to auto-link a URL that is already wrapped in a link element). It was written by the Mozilla team for addons.mozilla.org and support.mozilla.org so it should be production ready. # 25th October 2010, 1:32 pm

Firesheep (via) Oh wow. A Firefox extension that makes sniffing for insecured (non-HTTPS) cookie requests on your current WiFi network and logging in as that person a case of clicking a couple of buttons. Always possible of course, but it’s never been made easy before. Private VPNs are about to become a lot more popular. # 25th October 2010, 9:11 am

Linked Data at the Guardian. The Guardian’s Open Platform API can now be queried by MusicBrainz ID and ISBN, opening up some extremely useful new types of query. # 19th October 2010, 7:11 pm

jQuery 1.4.3 Released. Once again, the thing that impresses me most about this jQuery release is how stable the core API is. Hardly any new methods added, but the existing methods are made faster, more flexible and more predictable. The same as been true for the past several releases as well. It just keeps getting more and more polished. # 17th October 2010, 12:15 am

PostgreSQL: 5 Minutes to Binary Replication. The missing manual. # 14th October 2010, 8:23 am