The Washington Post recently launched a comprehensive votes database that lets you browse every vote in the U.S. Congress since 1991 and is updated several times daily.
Here, for instance, is the House vote mentioned in this Slashdot blurb.
Disclaimer: I'm the Web developer who worked on this database.
Not all newspapers are behind the times. I'm fortunate to have worked for the Web sites of two news companies that really "get it" -- the Lawrence Journal-World in Lawrence, Kansas, and the Washington Post.
Similarly, washingtonpost.com is quite good. We just launched Post Remix, which encourages developers to put together apps with our RSS feeds. Check it out.
Hey Daniel,
Django hasn't even been "officially" released yet, so I apologize that you had troubles installing a pre-release version.
We (Django developers) have been using the framework for a long time internally, but creating an installation script is something we've never had to do. That, and documentation, are our top priorities before we actually launch our first version.
The cat got out of the bag a bit early, and before we knew it everybody was linking to our Web site, even though we only offer Subversion access to the code at this point. I can't complain that people are excited about our project, but I wish they'd hold off on judging it until we considered it ready for release.
> I don't mind people reinventing the wheel over > and over again but whenever you see people saying > "Language X's answer to Rails" all the time, you > gotta be thinking to yourself, wow, maybe I > should try Rails FIRST and then try the > knock-offs.
Disclaimer: I'm one of the two core developers of Django.
Django isn't a reinvention of the wheel or "copycat" of Ruby on Rails. We wrote it about two years ago for production use at the newspaper Web site I work for and have been using it since then. (I believe Rails was released one year ago.) It's a framework that was derived from our production sites.
Frankly, it's not intended to be an "answer" to Rails, and I'm disappointed (but not surprised) it's being talked-about as such. Rails and Django solve different problems. Django is more suited for content-management, because it gives you a lot of content-management capability for free.
"They responded that they had every intention to not shut them down as long as their licenses permit it, and one of the engineers insinuated that they might be working on a Google Maps API or a similar way to build on top of Maps (he actually said, "to make them not hacks," by which I think he meant not unauthorized)."
Disclaimer: I'm the guy that did chicagocrime.org, so I'm biased in favor of openness.
I'd been dreading the possibility that the site would get Slashdotted. Sorry 'bout the slowness, folks.
Although almost every single page of the site is cached, it's still fundamentally performance-intensive because there's a ton of data and it's very "sticky" content that's addictive to browse. The bottleneck is now at the cache level. Unfortunately I can't do anything about it now, because I'm at work.
Thanks for the attention.
Exporting from GMail with Python
on
Gmail in the News
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I've been experimenting with a Python interface to Gmail. Just released version 0.1 today. Hope it's helpful to someone.
One strategy I use is to write ultra-generic PHP classes that handle generic Web interactions -- a SinglePageVisit, a OneStepValidatedTask, a TwoStepValidatedTask, etc. Those classes implement a basic logic -- e.g., the OneStepValidatedTask displays a form, then validates the user input, then either displays the form again with error messages or executes the SuccessAction.
Then I use composition or inheritance to extend these generic concepts into specific applications. (To continue my example, the child class for OneStepValidatedTask would define what exactly SuccessAction does.)
Slashdot Mirror
The Washington Post recently launched a comprehensive votes database that lets you browse every vote in the U.S. Congress since 1991 and is updated several times daily.
Here, for instance, is the House vote mentioned in this Slashdot blurb.
Disclaimer: I'm the Web developer who worked on this database.
Not all newspapers are behind the times. I'm fortunate to have worked for the Web sites of two news companies that really "get it" -- the Lawrence Journal-World in Lawrence, Kansas, and the Washington Post.
_ hughes/). FWIW, the operation has been covered by the New York Times and NPR.
The Journal-World's Web sites (including http://www.ljworld.com/ and http://www.lawrence.com/ allow comments on every story. Readers can have their own weblogs, and the site makes intensive database apps, on deadline, for all sorts of stuff -- like a database of every little-league game (e.g. http://www2.ljworld.com/game/2005/fields/langston
Similarly, washingtonpost.com is quite good. We just launched Post Remix, which encourages developers to put together apps with our RSS feeds. Check it out.
Hey Daniel, Django hasn't even been "officially" released yet, so I apologize that you had troubles installing a pre-release version. We (Django developers) have been using the framework for a long time internally, but creating an installation script is something we've never had to do. That, and documentation, are our top priorities before we actually launch our first version. The cat got out of the bag a bit early, and before we knew it everybody was linking to our Web site, even though we only offer Subversion access to the code at this point. I can't complain that people are excited about our project, but I wish they'd hold off on judging it until we considered it ready for release.
> I don't mind people reinventing the wheel over
> and over again but whenever you see people saying
> "Language X's answer to Rails" all the time, you
> gotta be thinking to yourself, wow, maybe I
> should try Rails FIRST and then try the
> knock-offs.
Disclaimer: I'm one of the two core developers of Django.
Django isn't a reinvention of the wheel or "copycat" of Ruby on Rails. We wrote it about two years ago for production use at the newspaper Web site I work for and have been using it since then. (I believe Rails was released one year ago.) It's a framework that was derived from our production sites.
Frankly, it's not intended to be an "answer" to Rails, and I'm disappointed (but not surprised) it's being talked-about as such. Rails and Django solve different problems. Django is more suited for content-management, because it gives you a lot of content-management capability for free.
Here are two pieces of evidence that Google does *not* disapprove of Google Maps hacks:
m apscraigslist-mashup.html
m aps_hac.html
1. A post to the official Google blog: http://google-code-featured.blogspot.com/2005/04/
"While we have no official API for Maps yet, work like this really is amazing and deserves recognition."
2. http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2005/05/google_
"They responded that they had every intention to not shut them down as long as their licenses permit it, and one of the engineers insinuated that they might be working on a Google Maps API or a similar way to build on top of Maps (he actually said, "to make them not hacks," by which I think he meant not unauthorized)."
Disclaimer: I'm the guy that did chicagocrime.org, so I'm biased in favor of openness.
Yes, CrowScape, I'm familiar with ICAM. Actually, that's where chicagocrime.org gets its data. My site provides a different view of the information.
I'd been dreading the possibility that the site would get Slashdotted. Sorry 'bout the slowness, folks.
Although almost every single page of the site is cached, it's still fundamentally performance-intensive because there's a ton of data and it's very "sticky" content that's addictive to browse. The bottleneck is now at the cache level. Unfortunately I can't do anything about it now, because I'm at work.
Thanks for the attention.
I've been experimenting with a Python interface to Gmail. Just released version 0.1 today. Hope it's helpful to someone.
I highly recommend Dive into Python, a free online book that's targeted at experienced programmers.
Yes, it's completely possible, as long as your version of PHP has pdflib [http://pdflib.com/] installed as a module or compiled in.
And, yes, it appears to be legal. (It better be, considering I use it at my job.)
One strategy I use is to write ultra-generic PHP classes that handle generic Web interactions -- a SinglePageVisit, a OneStepValidatedTask, a TwoStepValidatedTask, etc. Those classes implement a basic logic -- e.g., the OneStepValidatedTask displays a form, then validates the user input, then either displays the form again with error messages or executes the SuccessAction.
Then I use composition or inheritance to extend these generic concepts into specific applications. (To continue my example, the child class for OneStepValidatedTask would define what exactly SuccessAction does.)
This approach has been useful so far.