Simon Willison’s Weblog

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428 items tagged “projects”

Posts about projects I have worked on.

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.

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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:

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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.

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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.