416 items tagged “projects”
Posts about projects I have worked on.
2009
djangopeople.net on GitHub. I’ve released the source code for Django People, the geographical community site developed last year by myself and Natalie Downe (it hasn’t otherwise been touched since April last year, so it needs porting to Django 1.1). If you want a new feature on the site, implement it and I’ll see about merging it in.
rev=canonical bookmarklet and designing shorter URLs
I’ve watched the proliferation of URL shortening services over the past year with a certain amount of dismay. I care about the health of the web and try to ensure that URLs I am responsible will last for as long as possible, and I think it’s very unlikely that all of these new services will still be around in twenty years time. Last month I suggested that the Internet Archive start mirroring redirect databases, and last week I was pleased to hear that Archiveteam, a different organisation, had already started crawling.
[... 920 words]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.
Rate limiting with memcached
On Monday, several high profile “celebrity” Twitter accounts started spouting nonsense, the victims of stolen passwords. Wired has the full story—someone ran a dictionary attack against a Twitter staff member, discovered their password and used Twitter’s admin tools to reset the passwords on the accounts they wanted to steal.
[... 910 words]2008
lightningtimer.net. I’m fed up of having to dig out or knock up a timer script every time I manage lightning talks, so I’ve given one a domain name. You can use lightningtimer.net/#90 to set a different start time for the counter.
Tweetersation. Nat and my latest side project: a JSONP API powered tool to more easily follow conversations between people on Twitter, by combining their tweets in to a single timeline.
csrf_protect.php. A PHP class for applying CSRF protection to existing PHP applications, using output buffering to rewrite any POST forms on a page. Heavily inspired by Django’s CSRF middleware. Tell me if you spot any bugs!
backup_to_s3.py. I wrote Yet Another S3 backup script today. It’s a thin wrapper about boto that doesn’t do anything particularly impressive, but it fits my brain.
django-html. A small project I’m working on to make Django behave better with regards to HTML v.s. XHTML.
Announcing dmigrations
The team at Global Radio (formerly GCap Media) is the largest group of Django developers I’ve personally worked with, consisting of 14 developers split into two scrum teams, all contributing to the same overall codebase.
[... 625 words]json-tinyurl. Because sometimes you want to be able to create a shorter version of a URL directly from JavaScript without hosting your own server-side proxy.
Get Lat Lon now has a “Get my location (by IP)” button. It took all of five minutes to add using the new google.loader.ClientLocation API. The button is only visible if your location can be resolved.
json-head. I’ve deployed another App Engine mini-app, which provides a JSON-P API for running HEAD requests against an arbitrary URL (useful for checking things like Content-Length and Content-Type headers and whether a URL returns 200). App Engine’s urlfetch limitations mean it can only deal with port 80 and 443 requests.
jsontime. Nat and I threw this together this morning—it runs on Google App Engine and exposes Python’s pytz timezone library over JSONP.
2007
Get Lat Lon. I finally got fed up of hunting around for simple latitude/longitude tools when messing around with mapping APIs, so I built my own with a memorable URL. I plan to add new features as and when I need them.
idproxy.net: Use your Yahoo! account as an OpenID
In an ideal world, some or all of the sites with large user databases (Yahoo!, AOL, Google, Amazon and so on) would act as OpenID providers, allowing their users to sign in to OpenID supporting sites around the Web. Until that happens, people who want to use OpenID need to sign up for Yet Another Account to do so.
[... 414 words]2005
Introducing Django
You may know that I spent a year working in Kansas for a local newspaper—the Lawrence Journal-World. I’m delighted to announce that a decent chunk of the software I worked on there is now available as open-source, in the form of the Django web framework.
[... 614 words]Testing a new version of IXR
Almost two years to the day since the last release, I’ve put together a new version of IXR, my PHP XML-RPC library. I haven’t published it on the site just yet as I want to make sure any bugs are ironed out first, but you can grab a copy here:
[... 177 words]2003
IXR 2.0
Harry Fuecks has been hacking on my XML-RPC library, and has released a new version with some significant changes. His article on phpPatterns describes the changes and provides a link to download the updated code. He’s made a bunch of interesting architectural changes which take advantage of a number of useful PEAR classes, including HTTP_Request which provides support for proxies and authentication, two frequently requested features.
[... 127 words]New anti-comment-spam measure
I’ve added a new anti-comment-spam measure to this site. The majority of comment spam exists for one reason and one reason only to increase the Google PageRank of the site linked from the spam and specifically to increase its ranking for the term used in the link. This is why so many comment spams include links like this: Cheap Viagra.
[... 268 words]getElementsBySelector()
Inspired by Andy, I decided to have a crack at something I’ve been thinking about trying for a long time. document.getElementsBySelector is a javascript function which takes a standard CSS style selector and returns an array of elements objects from the document that match that selector. For example:
Image Drag bookmarklet
I got a good response to yesterday’s call for help on finding an HTML element’s co-ordinates on a page. I ended up using PPK’s findPos functions which seemed to do the trick just fine.
[... 338 words]2002
Pingback implemented
I’ve implemented PingBack on my blog. PingBack is a system for tracking who is linking to your blog in a controlled way, based on a post by Stuart a few months ago. The idea is that when you link to a PingBack enabled blog you (or your blogging tool) should send an XML-RPC “ping” to that blog’s PingBack server telling it where you have linked to and where you linked from. The PingBack server can then grab your page, check that the link is there and extract a title and short description from the blog. The system is an alternative to (and was inspired by) MoveableType’s TrackBack feature. Stuart and I are actively developing the idea and will be releasing code and documentation to help other people experiment with the system in the near future.
A new XML-RPC library for PHP
I spent most of yesterday messing around with XML-RPC. There are a variety of XMl-RPC libraries available for PHP but none of them felt right for what I needed. So, I’ve written my own.
[... 115 words]Archivist goes live
After a successful private beta, the new searchable css-discuss archive is ready for use by the general public. If you spot any bugs or have any suggestions for improving the archive please drop me a line.
[... 88 words]Amazon web services
Amazon have launched a brand new web service interface to their huge database of products. I’ve been playing around with it, and I’ve knocked together a simple search engine example in PHP, with the code available for anyone who wants it. I did a similar thing a few months ago when Google released their Web API so we’ve set up a new site at Incutio to host these and other open source projects—scripts.incutio.com. The site is only a few hours old and we’d love some feedback—contact us directly or add a comment to this entry.