Reading for the modern web
JavaScript the Good Parts is a classic book, if you're into dead trees and want to learn why some people love JavaScript. You can get a lot of the philosophy of modern JavaScript wizardry for free from Douglas Crockford (YUI) and John Resig (jQuery) and there's a ton of good stuff covering everything from philosophy to in-the-trenches coding available from YUI Theater.
DailyJS.com is a good resource for staying abrest of what's going on (not a huge fan of ajaxian.com's style); the 24ways.org web advent calendar was a good survey of where modern web development's going.
Finally, Google's closure library has some interesting tools (Closure Compiler is great) and the articles explaining their philosophy have a lot to learn from even if you don't use the Closure library; there's also a lot of modern performance wisdom summarized in Let's make the web faster, some directly JavaScript related and most of the rest of interest to any front-end developer.
Django: reliably saving URLs to a file field
Most of the suggestions you'll find online suggest using urllib.urlretrieve to save the remote URL to a temporary file which you can then wrap normally. Unfortunately, urlretrieve does no error handling by default and it's a bit contorted to add so I found it easier to use Django's NamedTemporaryFile class:
from django.core.files import File from django.core.files.temp import NamedTemporaryFile img_temp = NamedTemporaryFile(delete=True) img_temp.write(urllib2.urlopen(url).read()) img_temp.flush() im.file.save(img_filename, File(img_temp))
Washington DC 1851
Web Toolbox
red_spider
A spider based on Mark Nottingham's redbot: it will produce a nice HTML report of page cacheability and, optionally, HTML validation; since it uses the same nbhttp library it's pretty fast, too. There are a number of options for filtering and it allows you to save lists of page and media URLs for use with tools like wk-bench or tornado-bench.
If you need to replace webserver log files at something approximating realtime, log_replay is your friend. It uses Tornado's non-blocking HTTP client (based on pycurl - at some point it would be good to refactor down to just that) to fetch all of the URLs but will sleep any time it's too far ahead of the simulated virtual time.
tornado-bench
Also uses Tornado's non-blocking HTTP client, this program simply takes a big list of URLs and simply retrieves them as quickly as possible.
wk-bench
Mac OS X-specific tool which measures user-perceived page-load performance. It uses PyObjC to load a full WebKit browser, processes a list of URLs and reports the time taken from beginning the HTTP request until the browser fires the didFinishLoadForFrame event, which includes things like image loading, Flash, JavaScript, etc. This is also useful for reporting JavaScript errors as they are logged to the console and can very easily be extracted for verifying that you don't have on-load errors site-wide.
Mark Lynas: What happened in Copenhagen
Copenhagen was a disaster. That much is agreed. But the truth about what actually happened is in danger of being lost amid the spin and inevitable mutual recriminations. The truth is this: China wrecked the talks, intentionally humiliated Barack Obama, and insisted on an awful "deal" so western leaders would walk away carrying the blame. How do I know this? Because I was in the room and saw it happen.
— Mark Lynas
