Using Akismet with Django’s new comments framework. A nice example that demonstrates two features that were recently rolled in to the Django 1.0 betas: the new signals library and the new comments framework.

URLsafe base64 encoding/decoding in two lines. A much better solution than my base65 hack—if you understand how base64 padding works (I didn’t) you can use it to generate URL-safe compressed hashes. Performance should be significantly better than my version.

Django snippets: Sign a string using SHA1, then shrink it using url-safe base65. I needed a way to create tamper-proof URLs and cookies by signing them, but didn’t want the overhead of a full 40 character SHA1 hash. After some experimentation, it turns out you can knock a 40 char hash down to 27 characters by encoding it using a custom base65 encoding which only uses URL-safe characters.

Django 1.0 beta 2 released!. 1.0 draws ever closer. Important new features include major documentation and comment system refactorings, plus the removal of a bunch of deprecated code (including oldforms). Feature and string freezes are now in place, so it’s just bugs and documentation improvements between now and the final release.

Django 1.0 release party. The big ass-party will be at the Tied House in Mountain View on Saturday the 6th from 7pm. RSVP on the linked announcement.

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.

Gears for Safari Beta. “Chances are it will break your browser. Please proceed with caution.”

Flickr Developer Blog: API Responses as Feeds (via). Flickr API calls that return a “standard photos response” (e.g. flickr.photos.search and flickr.favorites.getList) can now output eight different feed formats as well, including Atom, RSS flavours, geoatom, geordf and KML. Error codes are returned as X-FlickrErrCode HTTP headers.

Oxford Geek Night 8—27th August 2008. Once again in the Jericho Tavern, this time with a musical theme.

“You’re No One If You’re Not On Twitter”. The inevitable Twitter song by Ben Walker (@ihatemornings), the resident troubadour at the Oxford Geek Nights. Go along on Wednesday to see him live!

jeresig’s sizzle. Sizzle is a new selector engine (work in progress, no IE support yet) from John Resig, designed to be small, standalone, library agnostic and ridiculously fast. It should eventually replace jQuery’s current selector engine, but if it stays around 4KB it’s also going to be really useful for projects that don’t need the overhead of a full library.

Django documentation (for 1.0). The documentation refactor is in: the docs for the upcoming 1.0 release have been tidied up, rearranged and ported to a new documentation system based on Sphinx (the Python documentation toolkit, NOT the full-text search engine). The URL has also changed to docs.djangoproject.com.

The Python Property Builtin. The always-educational Adam Gomaa explains the Python property built-in and shows how it can be used to improve Django’s model-based URL generation.

Film + Food & drink | guardian.co.uk (via). The Guardian’s publishing system supports tag intersections based on the URL; this page shows all film stories that also mention food. There’s even an RSS feed.

Tip: Configure SAX parsers for secure processing. Explains the billion laughs attack, among others.

DoS vulnerability in REXML. Ruby’s REXML library is susceptible to the “billion laughs” denial of service attack where recursively nested entities expand a single entitity reference to a billion characters (kind of like the exploding zip file attack). Rails applications that process user-supplied XML should apply the monkey-patch ASAP; a proper gem update is forthcoming.

TraceMonkey. Brendan Eich has been preaching the performance benefits of tracing and JIT for JavaScript on the conference circuit for at least a year, and the results from the first effort to be merged in to Mozilla core are indeed pretty astounding.

Visualization Strategies: Text & Documents. “List of ...” style posts usually make me want to stab someone with a fork; this is how that kind of post should be done—well researched, carefully written and, most importantly doesn’t call itself a “Top X Ys that will Z your ZZ”!

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.

Gears API Blog: Gears 0.4 is here!. New features are Geolocation, a Blob API for dealing with arbitrary binary data, onprogress() events for tracking HTTP downloads and uploads (meaning progress indicators) and the built-in Gears dialogs localized to 40 languages.

Google Code Blog: Two new ways to location-enable your web apps. The Gears Geolocation API isn’t very exciting just yet as it only really works on windows mobile devices, but the new google.loader.ClientLocation Ajax API is great—it gives you the user’s location based on looking up their IP address, saving you from needing to install a IP-to-geo lookup database.

django-timezones. Models, form fields and a template filter for dealing with timezones in Django.

Persistent Django on Amazon EC2 and EBS—the easy way. Useful tutorial on getting Django up and running on EC2 with EBS for a persistent PostgreSQL database.

Package Management Sudoku. “A package management system that can solve Sudoku based on package dependency rules is not something that I think would be useful or worth having”—like a red flag to a bull.

Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS). EC2 just got a whole lot more useful—you can now create “block level storage volumes” (think virtual hard drives) and mount them to an EC2 instance for real persistent storage—but because they’re virtual you can clone them, snapshot them and benefit from automatic replication.

querySelectorAll in Firefox 3.1. John Resig benchmarks the various JavaScript libraries’ support for querySelelectorAll, and finds an impressive 2-6x performance improvement over native DOM traversal. It’s worth clicking through to John’s experimental plugin for adding support to jQuery, which does a clever trick using __proto__ to convert the collection returned by querySelectorAll in to a jQuery object in browsers that support it.

SecondLife rolls out Mono-powered servers. Most of the work on this was done in Linden Lab’s Brighton UK office. If you’re interested in Mono and want to live in Brighton, they’re hiring!

Facebook engineering notes on Scaling Out. Jason Sobel explains a couple of tricks Facebook use to deal with consistency between their California and Virginia data centres. The first is to hijack the MySQL replication stream to include information about memcached records to invalidate; the second is to use Layer 7 load balancers which inspect a “last modification time” cookie and send users to the masters in California if they have updated their profile in the past 20 seconds.

UnicodeDictWriter—write unicode strings out to Excel compatible CSV files using Python. Stuart Langridge and I spent quite a while this morning battling with Excel. The magic combination for storing unicode text in a CSV file such that Excel correctly reads it is UTF-16, a byte order mark and tab delimiters rather than commas.

Cyberstar. Adrian made the front cover of the Chicago Tribune magazine!

Dare left something out (and it’s important). Dave Winer: “You should at least learn the lessons and add to REST what it needs to catch up with XML-RPC. Seriously. What’s missing in REST, btw, is a standard method of serializing structs, lists and scalar types.” That would be JSON.

Explaining REST to Damien Katz. I didn’t know that it was Mark Baker back in 2002 who first pointed out that SOAP was flawed because it ignored the architecture of the Web as defined by Roy Fielding’s Ph.D thesis.

АЭРОКРАТ КОНЦЕПТ (via). Another great Airship blog. I don’t speak Russian, but the photos and videos speak for themselves.

Historic Airship Pictures: the Shenandoah, the Los Angeles, the Akron and the Macon as well as the Zeppelins and many more. The US Navy built some truly beautiful airships back in the 1930s.

Domain-Driven Design in an Evolving Architecture. How the team at guardian.co.uk used Domain-Driven Design in their recent two year rebuild. The core of DDD is having end users involved with domain modeling, which results in a shared domain language that should be understood by everyone involved.

minidetector. Neat piece of Django middleware that adds a “mobile = True” attribute to the request object if the request’s user-agent matches a list of strings of known low-power browsers in mobiles, PDAs or game consoles.

REST, I just don’t get it. Read the comments for some excellent practical reasons to care about REST, including cache management (PUT and DELETE can expire the cache entries for the corresponding GET), the ability to add or move parts of the server API without redeploying client libraries and the idempotency of GET / PUT / DELETE and HEAD (repeated POST operations may have side-effects).