Simon Willison’s Weblog

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Entries in Mar, 2005

Filters: Type: entry × Year: 2005 × Month: Mar × Sorted by date


Greasemonkey as a lightweight intermediary

In The architecture of intermediation, Jon Udell discusses the need for a mechanism for a high-level tool for adding custom features to web applications. In Jon’s case, he wants to add a private bookmarks feature to del.icio.us. Jon thought about using a web proxy to intercept and modify del.icio.us pages, but ruled it out as too low-level.

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PyCon observations

I’m back from my two week stint in the US, and currently suffering from vicious jet-lag (my body wants me to go to sleep at 5am and wake up just past noon). Herewith some observations on PyCon, SxSW and the differences between the two.

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Choice SxSW quotes

My American adventure is ongoing; I’m still in Austin at the moment, but I’ll be off to Washington D.C. in a few days and there’s a small chance I’ll get there via Dallas. This doesn’t leave much opportunity for online shenanigans, but there were a few things from SxSW that really needed a mention. The conference, as ever, was awesome—if not for the panels then certainly for the socialising. If anything I stretched myself too thin this year trying to keep up with the Brit Pack, the WaSP crew, some ex-colleagues from Lawrence and the people I met in San Francisco back in May.

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Fixing Paul Graham’s Footnotes

I’m a big fan of Paul Graham’s essays, the latest of which is How to Start a Startup. There’s just one niggling problem with them: Paul makes extensive use of footnotes, but provides no way of jumping from the reference in the text to the footnote at the bottom of the page and back up again. Instead, you have to manually down to the bottom of the article and back up again every time you hit a footnote reference.

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Problems with Trac? Switch to FSFS

I’m head over heels in love with Trac, and have been for about 6 months now. It really is best-of-breed software: it neatly integrates a wiki, a simple bug tracker and a Subversion repository browser with clean markup, a nice default design and a learning curve for new users that can be measured in minutes. No wonder it’s started to show up all over the place.

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LugRadio Live

The guys over at LugRadio (nice new site, see Stuart’s blog for gnarly implementation details) have announced the details of their long hinted-at Linux event, LugRadio Live. I’m pretty excited about it; word on the grape vine is that they’re booking some really cool speakers, but they’re completely committed to keeping a grassroots feel to things. The 15 minute lightning talks should be a lot of fun (I’ve tentatively offered one on Firefox extensions) and it sounds like the atmosphere will reflect that of the show—irreverent, fun and with a trip to the pub afterwards.

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