What is Sacramento Connect?

Sacramento Connect is a network of high-quality news providers and bloggers in the Sacramento region and is the brain-child of The Sacramento Bee*. Tying all the affiliated sites together is a toolbar you’ll see at the bottom of all the pages.

The toolbar, powered by Meebo, Lingospot, and Yahoo, contains stories and topics related to the page currently viewed, and also offers a powerful multi-site search feature powered by Yahoo BOSS.

From a technical standpoint, we’ve done a fairly decent job at keeping the toolbar code light-weight, as it doesn’t bundle third-party JavaScript libraries, and it only requires a single script tag to load the toolbar on the page.

Kudos also go to git and GitHub, which have proven to be invaluable during the development of this project.

“You have requested an encrypted page that contains some unencrypted information. Information that you see or enter on this page could easily be read by a third party.”

The error is caused by a page requested with HTTPS that contains resources (such as stylesheets or images) requested via plain old HTTP.

The solution is to use Protocol-relative URLs, replacing references to http://hostname/path with //hostname/path

For example,
<img src="http://hostname/path/image.png" />
should be represented as
<img src="//hostname/path/image.png" />

Leaving off the protocol allows the image to be served via HTTP when the page is requested via HTTP, and served via HTTPS when the page is requested with HTTPS.

Note: This technique may introduce additional CPU overhead since resources normally served via HTTP would be served via HTTPS, thus the technique is advised on pages that absolutely require HTTPS, such as secure login forms.

Here are the steps (tested on Linux and Mac OS X):

1. Download the latest source from http://pypi.python.org/pypi/setuptools

curl -O http://pypi.python.org/packages/source/s/setuptools/setuptools-0.6c11.tar.gz

2. Extract the archive

tar -zxvf setuptools-0.6c11.tar.gz
cd setuptools-0.6c11

3. Run the setup.py script from your custom Python (replace /opt/Python-2.6.4 with the path to your Python).

/opt/Python-2.6.4/bin/python setup.py build
/opt/Python-2.6.4/bin/python setup.py install

4. Test easy_install

/opt/Python-2.6.4/bin/easy_install simplejson

Note: Some of the commands may require sudo or admin privileges

The front end leverages YUI‘s Autocomplete, DataTable, and Paginator widgets, and uses the the JSONP-enabled ScriptNodeDataSource class of the DataSource utility to allow cross-domain requests to a JSON-based RESTful API. (Note: We hope to open up the API for external use in the next few months.)

The SQL database, updated on a weekly basis, is obtained from http://leginfo.ca.gov/ and was released by the State of California in June 2009 in response to a lawsuit brought against the State by the California First Amendment Coalition and MAPLight.org.

http://pseudogreen.org/blog/yes_leopard_i_want_to_open_it_already.html

The irritating dialog is one of the few usability downgrades from previous versions of OS X in my opinion, but it’s good to know the “feature” can be disabled.

Fortunately, OS X Leopard and Snow Leopard include a readline shared library in the stock Python install, which can be easily copied into the new Python install’s site-packages folder to enable Python command-line history.

Simply issue the following command to add readline on OS X Snow Leopard.

cp /System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.6/lib/python2.6/lib-dynload/readline.so /opt/Python-2.6.3/lib/python2.6/site-packages/

Note: This assumes a new install of Python at /opt/Python-2.6.3.  Adjust the path as needed for the path and version of Python installed.