1 month ago
Simon Willison : Plupload - Plupload. Fantastic new open source project from the team behind TinyMCE. Plupload offers a cross-browser JavaScript File uploading API that handles multiple file uploads, client-side progress meters, type filtering and even client-side image resizing a [via]
Jeremy Zawodny : Plupload - A tool for uploading files using Flash, Silverlight, Google Gears, HTML5 or Browserplus - Plupload - A tool for uploading files using Flash, Silverlight, Google Gears, HTML5 or Browserplus: finally what appears to be a good solution to photo uploads from the browser!
philgyford : Plupload - A tool for uploading files using Flash, Silverlight, Google Gears, HTML5 or Browserplus - From the developers of TmyMCE. (via Simon Willison)
# copy3 month ago
philgyford : Crowdsourced document analysis and MP expenses - About writing the Guardian's site that lets people examine MPs' expenses. Especially good on the lessons learned from the first version, and how they improved for the second.
# copy3 month ago
Simon Willison : Notes on designing the Guardian iPhone app - Notes on designing the Guardian iPhone app. By John-Henry Barac, the principle designer of he iPhone application who also previously worked on the Guardian’s print transition to the Berliner format.
philgyford : Barac consulting | Notes on designing the Guardian iPhone app - Always good to read about design processes, and this helps me understand why some of the things I find slightly annoying about the otherwise good app are the way they are. (via Simon Willison)
# copy5 month ago
Simon Willison : Cartographer.js - Cartographer.js. “Thematic mapping for Google Maps”—which means an easy way of adding heat maps (aka chloropleths), pie charts and point clusters as a layer over a Google map.
nelson : Cartographer.js - Library for overlaying data on Google Maps
philgyford : Cartographer.js – thematic mapping for Google Maps - Javascript library for mapping data nicely onto Google Maps. Area-scaled circles, choropleth, etc. (via Simon Willison)
# copy7 month ago
philgyford : Simonw's mytweets at master - GitHub - "Script for saving a JSON archive of your tweets." I'm already archiving mine another way, but a handy thing nonetheless.
# copy8 month ago
Simon Willison : IanVisits: London Events Calendar - IanVisits: London Events Calendar. Ian Mansfield maintains a superb calendar of cultural (and geeky) events in London. Lectures, tours, bat walks, film screenings... did you know there’s a Festival of Model Tramways this weekend?
philgyford : IanVisits London Events Guide - Fantastic guide of interesting things going on in London. I'd like an iCal file, but otherwise, handy stuff. (via Simon Willison)
# copy9 month ago
Simon Willison : Styling buttons to look like links - Styling buttons to look like links. Nat has a neat trick for styling submit buttons to look like regular links—so there’s absolutely no excuse for using a “delete” link when you should be using a POST request.
philgyford : Styling buttons to look like links | Natalie Downe - For the very few occasions when you want to make a submit button look like a standard link. Not that you should. (via Simon Willison)
# copy10 month ago
Simon Willison : geocoders - geocoders. A fifteen minute project extracted from something else I’m working on—an ultra simple Python API for geocoding a single string against Google, Yahoo! Placemaker, GeoNames and (thanks to Jacob) Yahoo! Geo’s web services.
philgyford : Simonw's geocoders at master - GitHub - Python "code for accessing various geocoding web services with an ultra simple API". Sounds good.
# copy10 month ago
Simon Willison : Yahoo! Placemaker - Yahoo! Placemaker. Really exciting new API from Yahoo!—Placemaker accepts a block of text (or a URL to HTML or RSS) and extracts and returns geographical locations mentioned in the text. I just ran my djng blog entry through it and it pulled out “Pr
Andy Baio : Yahoo! Placemaker, extract world locations from unstructed content - also, Yahoo released the huge GeoPlanet/WOE placename database under a CC license
philgyford : Yahoo! Placemaker_ Beta - YDN - Parses text and extracts any recognisable locations. (via Simon Willison)
# copy10 month ago
Simon Willison : The Little Manual of API Design (PDF) - The Little Manual of API Design (PDF). A concise, highly readable guide to designing APIs that are “Complete, Easy to learn and memorize, lead to readable code, hard to misuse, and easy to extend”, based on lessons learnt over many years of developm
philgyford : The Little Manual of API Design (PDF) - Sounds like a handy thing for future reference. (via Simon Willison)
# copy11 month ago
philgyford : Readernaut - Nicely done site for not only logging your reading but keeping notes on it too.
# copy13 month ago
Simon Willison : Building and Scaling a Startup on Rails: 12 Things We Learned the Hard Way - Building and Scaling a Startup on Rails: 12 Things We Learned the Hard Way. Lessons learned from Posterous. Some good advice in here, in particular “Memcache later: If you memcache first, you will never feel the pain and never learn how bad your data
philgyford : Building and Scaling a Startup on Rails: 12 Things We Learned the Hard Way - Axon Flux - A Ruby on Rails Blog - Nice "lessons learned" piece (via Simon Willison)
# copy14 month ago
philgyford : Support OpenStreetMap Donate Now - OpenStreetMap are trying to rais £10,000 to buy a new API database server for their fantastic work. (via Simon Willison)
# copy14 month ago
Simon Willison : Recreating the button - Recreating the button. Fascinating article from Doug Bowman on the work that went in to creating custom CSS buttons for use across Google’s different applications, avoiding images to improve performance ensure they could be easily styled using just CS
philgyford : Recreating the button | stopdesign - Doug Bowman on how buttons were developed on Google apps. Good HTML/CSS cleverness. (via Simon Willison)
# copy14 month ago
Simon Willison : The Django Book: Version 2.0 - The Django Book: Version 2.0. Adrian’s working on a new edition of the Django Book updated to cover version 1.0. As with the first edition, it will be available free online in addition to a published Apress paperback. The first three chapters are now [via]
philgyford : The Django Book: Version 2.0 (English) - New, in-progress, free version of the book for learning Django v1.0. (via Simon Willison)
# copy15 month ago
deusx : ASCII by Jason Scott / Eviction, or the Coming Datapocalypse - "A terrible thing happened recently. You might have missed it. AOL Hometown, which itself was actually a combination of a bunch of previously acquired websites, shut down. It shut down on October 31 of this year. If you try to go to a site that used
Andy Baio : Jason Scott on the closure of AOL's online communities - like physical evictions, there need to be laws protecting community data in the event of closure
Simon Willison : Eviction, or the Coming Datapocalypse - Eviction, or the Coming Datapocalypse. Jason Scott on AOL’s closure of Hometown, their hosting service. In related news, Lycos just announced they are closing Tripod, which has been providing free hosting for 13 years.
philgyford : ASCII by Jason Scott / Eviction, or the Coming Datapocalypse - Catching up on stuff... AOL Hometown shut down and wiped all its users' sites with four weeks' notice. It's bad enough when chunks of the web disappear, but worse like this. (via Simon Willison)
# copy15 month ago
Simon Willison : Oakland crime maps XI: how close, and how bad? - Oakland crime maps XI: how close, and how bad?. Michal Migurski’s experiments with heat maps for Oakland Crimespotting, using OpenStreetMap data as that allows him to position his heat map layer underneath the street labels, keeping them legible.
philgyford : Oakland crime maps XI: how close, and how bad? (tecznotes) - Thought process on making heat maps out of the Oakland Crimespotting data. (via Simon Willison)
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18 month ago
Simon Willison : Why Google App Engine is broken and what Google must do to fix it - Why Google App Engine is broken and what Google must do to fix it. Aral Balkan describes a number of critical issues with App Engine. If you’re considering building something serious on it you need to read this article; I’ve run in to several of the
philgyford : Why Google App Engine is broken and what Google must do to fix it. at Aral Balkan - My word, it sounds quite useless really. (via Simon Willison)
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19 month ago
Jeremy Zawodny : Simon Willison joins Guardian News & Media - Simon Willison joins Guardian News & Media: congrats Simon!
wearehugh : Simon Willison joins Guardian News & Media | Media | guardian.co.uk - so awesome
# copy21 month ago
Simon Willison : James Bennett: Why HTML - James Bennett: Why HTML. Finally, somewhere to point people when they ask why I avoid XHTML that’s a bit more up to date than Hixie’s rant from 2002.
philgyford : Why HTML - More recent arguments for why to use HTML rather than XHTML. (via Simon Willison)
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21 month ago
deusx : What is it like to write a technical book? at Xaprb - "I would say that avoiding the temptation to write, and outlining in fanatical detail, is a very high-value activity for writing a book that’s hierarchically organized like this. "
Jeremy Zawodny : What is it like to write a technical book? - What is it like to write a technical book?: 'You can cut your work down by about 75% if you keep working on more and more detailed outlines, long past the point you think you ought to start “writing.”' True. Lots of good stuff in that
Simon Willison : What is it like to write a technical book? - What is it like to write a technical book?. Plenty of food for thought from the lead author of the new edition of High Performance MySQL. It’s amazing how Word is still an integral part of most technical book projects despite its obvious inadequacies
philgyford : What is it like to write a technical book? at Xaprb - Great write-up of what it was really like to write a big complicated book, managed by rather disorganised people. (via Simon Willison)
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22 month ago
Simon Willison : Tracking Christmas Cheer with Google Charts - Tracking Christmas Cheer with Google Charts. Brian Suda’s Google Charts tutorial on 24 ways has proved invaluable for figuring out how to handle grid lines and axis labels, both of which are pretty unintuitive (and not hugely helped by the official do
philgyford : 24 ways: Tracking Christmas Cheer with Google Charts - A good guide on how to use Google Charts. (via Simon Willison)
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23 month ago
Simon Willison : Unobtrusive JavaScript with jQuery - Unobtrusive JavaScript with jQuery. The online handout for the tutorial I gave this morning at XTech.
Rod Begbie : Unobtrusive JavaScript with jQuery - Some great tips from Simon Willison on using JQuery effectively. #
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24 month ago
Linkorama : WikiNear - A FireEagle/Wikipedia mashup
factoryjoe : wikinear.com - Saved By: Chris Messina | View Details | Give Thanks Tags: wikipedia, fire eagle, location, Simon willison
deusx : wikinear.com - "wikinear.com shows Wikipedia pages near you, based on your location according to Yahoo! Fire Eagle. The site is optimised for use on a mobile phone."
philgyford : Wikinear.com - Awesome little app by Simon Willison that shows you places near you from Wikipedia, using Yahoo! Fire Eagle. Makes me want an iPhone.
# copy
24 month ago
plasticbag : Simon Willison's knocked up Wikinear, which is a really simple and classy Fire Eagle app to show you stuff near your current location. - Really interesting set of things going on here - stores your auth information in a cookie, which is quite classy. No need to register at all. Shows you your five nearest geotagged places in Wikipedia.
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