For those who haven’t yet come across it somewhere on the web, may I recommend checking out the Timeline widget developed by David F. Huynh of the MIT Simile project. It’s a snazzy DHTML/JavaScript tool for visualizing chronological events on a scrollable, graphical timeline — sort of a Google Maps for temporal information.

I’ve been working quite a bit with the Simile widget lately, co-developing (with David Donohue) a module that integrates the widget into Drupal, allowing Drupal sites to display any CCK / Views content as graphical timelines.

Today, inspired by Alexandre Passant’s RSS2Timeline implementation, I sat down to code up a generic web service that can take any Atom or RSS feed and convert it into a JSON-based event source for the Timeline widget. My goal was to make it absolutely trivial to embed live Atom/RSS timelines into blogs and whatnot, so that anyone with basic HTML skills could use timelines without having to go through the relatively complex technical setup the widget requires.

I hereby present the Universal Timeline Aggregator , available at http://timeline.to/ (I’ve been snapping up Tonga’s dot-to domains since getting the ultimate vanity domain, ar.to, as a Christmas present; the “to” preposition works rather nicely for the present purpose, too.)

Trace is a project that started, like these things tend to, as an innocent, experimental Drupal module I hacked together to implement all of the core hooks exported by Drupal.

I was at the time working on Boost and wanted to gain a deeper understanding of the conditions and exact sequence in which the Drupal module hooks were invoked, so I took the API listing and wrote out the skeleton for each hook, sprinkling logging statements to capture and output the arguments passed to the hooks by Drupal.

As part of a distributed, geographically load-balanced DNS daemon I’ve been developing in Scheme, I’ve put together a set of GeoIP API bindings for Chicken Scheme that I’m hereby making available under the MIT License.

This was the first egg I’ve developed for Chicken — not to mention the first time I’d needed to make any real use of Chicken’s FFI — and I have to say I was pleasantly surprised at how easy it was to create.

It was gratifying to be able to go from zero to completed egg in only a couple hours simply by looking at some other eggs for examples on how to use foreign-lambda , create a setup spec, and write the eggdoc documentation.

The GeoIP API subset provided by the egg is straightforward to use. Basically, you feed in a hostname or an IP address, and you get back a country code or country name. Country codes can be returned as either the 2-letter or 3-letter codes defined in ISO-3166-1.

This weekend I tackled coding up a Drupal feature I’ve been sorely missing on many a past project: static page caching. My yet-to-be-named module is a replacement for Drupal 4.7’s built-in caching. Instead of storing the pre-generated cached pages in the database, the module stores them in a cache directory on the file system.

Big deal, right? Actually, as I’ll demonstrate below, it makes all the difference.