Simon Willison’s Weblog

Notes on designing the Guardian iPhone app. By John-Henry Barac, the principal designer of he iPhone application who also previously worked on the Guardian’s print transition to the Berliner format. # 20th December 2009, 12:55 pm

Guardian iPhone app. Released today, ad-free, £2.39 for the application, has an excellent offline mode. I helped build the backend web service, which is a Django app running on EC2. # 14th December 2009, 1:29 pm

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

The Guardian 1000 Novels Everyone Must Read in FluidDB. Nicholas J. Radcliffe loaded the Guardian’s list of 1000 novels in to FluidDB, where the ability for users to add their own ratings style metadata makes it an ideal dataset for exploring the capabilities of the platform. # 13th September 2009, 11:48 pm

Curating conversations. Chris Thorpe has open-sourced the Guardian’s moderated Twitter backchannel app, for displaying back channels at high profile (and hence high potential for abuse) events. It’s a Python application that runs on App Engine. # 16th July 2009, 7:34 pm

Four crowdsourcing lessons from the Guardian’s (spectacular) expenses-scandal experiment. Michael Andersen from the Nieman Journalism Lab interviewed me about the MP expenses crowdsourcing site. # 24th June 2009, 3:31 pm

The breakneck race to build an application to crowdsource MPs’ expenses. Charles Arthur wrote up a very nice piece on the development effort behind the Guardian’s crowdsourcing expenses app. # 19th June 2009, 10:16 pm

Investigate your MP’s expenses. Launched today, this is the project that has been keeping me ultra-busy for the past week—we’re crowdsourcing the analysis of the 700,000+ scanned MP expenses documents released this morning. It’s the Guardian’s first live Django-powered application, and also the first time we’ve hosted something on EC2. # 18th June 2009, 11:16 pm

Dealing with election results data. Alf Eaton loaded the Guardian’s European election results spreadsheet in to Google’s new Fusion Tables tool. # 12th June 2009, 6:06 pm

Exactly how well did the BNP do where you live? Guardian journalists spent a day and a half calling round different local authorities to get a proper breakdown of the European election results (which are only officially published in aggregate) and published the results as a spreadsheet on the Datablog. # 11th June 2009, 11:37 am

You ask, they answer: Neal’s Yard Remedies. After reading the comments, something tells me Neal’s Yard Remedies may be regretting their decision to answer questions from Guardian readers. # 27th May 2009, 10:35 am

Muck Rack: Links posted by Guardian Journalists on Twitter. I’m rather impressed by the Sawhorse Media collection of Twitter aggregation sites (Muck Rack aggregates journalists)—a simple idea very well executed. Here’s a nice example—this page shows links posted to Twitter by known Guardian journalists, but goes a step further and scrapes in the favicon, the real title of the page and resolves the domain from any shortened links. # 22nd May 2009, 10:02 pm

Drug seizures: how pure is street cocaine? Neat story on the Guardian Datablog using graphs from Timetric to show that while the purity of cocaine seized by customs over the past five years has stayed constant, the purity of drugs seized by the police has been trending downwards. # 13th May 2009, 12:34 pm

#DataJourn part 1: a new conversation. Journalism.co.uk report on the first instance of a Guardian story that was driven by an external developer’s work with data originally released on our Datablog. # 9th April 2009, 10:57 am

Automating PowerPoint with Python. Useful tutorial on using ActivePython’s win32com module to automate PowerPoint. The example code pulls in the top 50 banks by assets from the Guardian Data Store and generates a treemap using PowerPoint’s shape drawing primitives. # 3rd April 2009, 3:13 pm

UK Guardian Data + ManyEyes = ISAF Troops Contribution Story. Including a heat map showing countries that are contributing the most troops to Afghanistan. # 3rd April 2009, 2:44 pm

Tracking UK Liberal Indecency. The mashup I’ve been waiting for: Tom Hume used the Guardian Content API to track swearword usage over time. # 2nd April 2009, 4:44 pm

My Guardian OpenPlatform API’n’Data Hacks’n’Mashups Roundup. Superb collection of Guardian Open Platform mashups from Tony Hirst, all of which use free online tools such as Yahoo! Pipes and Many Eyes. We invited Tony in to give a tech talk at the Guardian last week. # 31st March 2009, 10:04 pm

Get our full university data. “The Guardian’s university rankings are the most visited part of Education Guardian”—and now they’re available as a spreadsheet. # 11th March 2009, 1:52 pm

Guardian + Lucene = Similar Articles + Categorisation. Alf Eaton loaded 13,000 Guardian articles tagged Science in to Solr and Lucene and is using Solr’s MoreLikeThisHandler to find related articles and automatically apply Guardian tags to Nature News articles. # 11th March 2009, 12:53 pm

Oscars 2009: the interactive results | guardian.co.uk. My latest project for the Guardian, put together on very short notice. Updates live as the results are announced, and allows Twitter users to vote on their favourite for each category by sending a specially formatted message to @guardianfilm—jQuery and Ajax polling against S3 under the hood. # 23rd February 2009, 2:19 am