Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.

  • Working with the Flickr API

    Flickr provides exemplary tools and documentation for their popular API and is also an excellent case study for social classification in the wild, so it’s worth taking a little time to understand their API. The App Garden is Flickr’s main API documentation page and the best place to start. From here you can “Create an…

  • Prototyping a todo list in Google App Engine

    In this walkthrough we’ll build a simple to-do list on Google App Engine so that users can log in and add new items to the to-do list, which are stored and displayed back to them later. (Much of this walkthrough follows the Getting Started documentation from the Google App Engine docs, and I’ll refer to…

  • Working around the same-origin policy

    As part of the basic security model of the Web, sites can’t usually make requests to pages on other domains — if they could, then just visiting any random site on the Web having recently logged in to your email could reveal the entire contents of your email to an attacker! In class we briefly…

  • Delicious Trailmaker Tutorial

    In our first class on August 31, we did an in-class demo showing one possible way to implement trails from Vannevar Bush’s Memex using the Delicious API. This tutorial reviews the steps from class. At the end of this tutorial, you will have constructed a small web application that saves a collection of bookmarks to…

  • Common AppEngine bulk upload issues

    Google’s documentation for AppEngine provides a very nice walkthrough for uploading and downloading data. But it doesn’t necessarily help with troubleshooting. Here are a few problems that multiple members of the class have run into and their solutions. Often you’ll store your database models in a common file (models.py, say) so that your bulk upload…

  • Avoiding undefined console

    When you’re writing JavaScript it’s handy to use console.log() to output debugging information to the Firebug or Safari console. The only problem is that this code will cause an error on browsers that don’t have a console object, like IE, or like Firefox without Firebug. One solution is to remove or comment out all the…

  • Working around the same-origin policy in Greasemonkey

    The same-origin policy prevents scripts on a page from communicating with servers on a different domain from the page. Implemented by all browsers, this prevents some cross-site scripting attacks. Of course, communicating with different web services is a common goal for mashups like the ones we’re building in this class. So if you need to…

  • Add jQuery to any (or every) webpage

    We’ve already seen how Firebug makes it incredibly easy to inspect the current page loaded in Firefox and run jQuery commands to quickly modify items on the page or test different selectors. But what if the webpage you’re interested in doesn’t already have jQuery installed? jQuery is becoming more and more widespread (the iSchool website…

  • Using separate files for CSS and JS

    One of your classmates rightly noted that Nick and I have said that you can (and often should) keep your HTML, CSS, and JavaScript in separate files, but have not provided any instructions about how to do that. Single File The single-file approach is good for quick one-off tests or demonstrations. This is where you…

  • Delicious Trailmaker Tutorial

    In our first class on September 1, we did an in-class demo showing one possible way to implement trails from Vannevar Bush’s Memex using the Delicious API. This tutorial reviews the steps from class. At the end of this tutorial, you will have constructed a small web application that saves a collection of bookmarks to…

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