Entries in Jul, 2004
Filters: Type: entry × Year: 2004 × Month: Jul × Sorted by date
Improving online credibility
If you’ve browsed Amazon’s product reviews recently you may have noticed an interesting new feature: Badges, little icons displayed below certain people’s names. This isn’t a new idea by any means—many online communities use special icons as rewards for members who make valuable contributions (SitePoint is a good example). What’s interesting about Amazon’s badges is that one of them is “Real Name”. Amazon’s Real Names FAQ explains the badge, and includes the following:
[... 230 words]Jimmy Wales on battling wiki spam
Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia was interviewed recently by the Slashdot community. One of the questions regarded protecting Wikis from spammers:
[... 241 words]Site-specific extensions
I’ve been thinking about per-site user stylesheets for a while now, but my colleague Adrian has gone one better: his All Music Guide Corrector extension for Firefox fixes their horrible JavaScript links, hides the useless Flash navigation and improves their unpopular “read more” links, causing them to load content on the current page rather than navigating to a new page entirely.
[... 211 words]News site registration
The single hottest topic in the online news industry at the moment is that of required registration. A number of large news sites (the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune) have moved to this model, and many local newspapers are following suit.
[... 660 words]Per-site user stylesheets
I’ve been thinking a lot about per-site user stylsheets recently. Eric Meyer’s CSS signatures are great for sites that support them (as this site does), but the sites that really need altering are highly unlikely to carry them. I posted a comment to that effect on photomatt.net a while ago, and thankfully it was spotted by Ryan Tomayko who has published a simple brilliant hack that uses XBL in Mozilla’s user stylesheet to execute JavaScript which adds a CSS signature to every site you visit.
[... 261 words]Instant authentication against an existing web application
I was thinking today about the problem of querying an existing authentication database from a new application—exactly the kind of thing web services are useful for. Then I realised that any web application protected by HTTP Basic authentication already provides a standard API against which queries can be run. Here’s the Python code to do exactly that:
[... 187 words]PHP 5 is out!
It’s finally here! Unfortunately PHP.net, while a great site in most respects, fails miserably when it comes to permalinks for news items and/or new software releases. You can grab it from their downloads page, and read more about it in the changelog. Now all it needs is widespread adoption. Unfortunately, something tells me PHP 4 is going to stick around for a long, long time.
[... 73 words]Compile everything with a one-liner
The other day, we noticed that the .py files in our main mod_python application at work did not have corresponding compiled .pyc files. mod_python runs as the unprivileged apache user, which on our server doesn’t have the required permissions to write the compiled .pyc files in to the directories in which our code lives.
[... 111 words]