PUBLIC MARKS with search well-meaning

getElementsBySelector is a python function which takes a standard CSS style selector and returns an array of elements objects from the document that match that selector. This is a frequently used function in JavaScript - if you use a library. Its kind of meaning less to have this function in the server side - unless you are doing screen-scarping. Then its very useful. Recently, I had to work on a Django app that does a bit of screen-scrapping - so I created this function to aid me.

What is "parsing"? Parsing is processing a series of symbols to extract their meaning. Typically, this means reading the words of a sentence and drawing information from them. When application programs need to process data that is provided as text, they must use some form of parsing logic. This logic scans the text characters and character groups (words) and recognizes patterns of groups to extract the underlying commands or information.

When searching for something on the web we’ve all had the experience of clicking on a link in a search engine’s results page only to find that the page no longer exists. If there’s no information on that page other than a default error message, the most likely course of action on the user’s part is to press the back button and try the next search result.

As site authors we can make our error pages more meaningful to our users, so that an error becomes an opportunity to bring the user back into a site and show them content that’s relevant to what they’re looking for. In this article I’ll show you how to do just that.

This book offers a highly accessible introduction to Natural Language Processing, the field that underpins a variety of language technologies ranging from predictive text and email filtering to automatic summarization and translation. You'll learn how to write Python programs to analyze the structure and meaning of texts, drawing on techniques from the fields of linguistics and artificial intelligence.

These are environments that were, until recently, uninhabited by human beings and that contemporary science and technology turn into "inhabitable" places (Antarctica, underwater world, outer space, deserts); but also those that are becoming "uninhabitable" due to the impacts of our way of life (pollution, technological accidents, economical pressures and global warming).

(Un)Inhabitable? – Art of Extreme Environments presents works that explore the meaning of living in extreme environments, in the imaginary realm as well as in the physical one, in the political, social and environmental fields as well as in the poetic ones.

his essay illustrates how my Street View collections reflect the excitement of exploring this new, virtual world. The world captured by Google appears to be more truthful and more transparent because of the weight accorded to external reality, the perception of a neutral, unbiased recording, and even the vastness of the project. At the same time, I acknowledge that this way of photographing creates a cultural text like any other, a structured and structuring space whose codes and meaning the artist and the curator of the images can assist in constructing or deciphering.

And why 160 characters? Again, when Hillebrand discovered during his research that the average post card usually contained around 150 characters; people were already used to communicating using so few characters. (Telex messages were usually around this length, too, meaning that business users could easily adapt to text messages.) You’ll also find that your average e-mail today isn’t much longer than a text message.

Application Programming Interface, a phrase that has a number of different meanings to the people build and use APIs, and virtually no meaning at all to those that don't. I like to think of an API as a bridge - one which allows information to flow from one piece of software to another. In the case of the Guardian's Content API, the bridge allows us to send requests to and receive information from the Guardian's huge database of articles, images, and other assets.

Apparently it’s embrace the developer community day at Facebook. In addition to the news that they are making activity stream data available to third party developers, they’ll also be making an announcement around OpenID, we’ve heard. And importantly, the announcement is that they’ll become what’s called a relying party, meaning anyone with an OpenID (Yahoo, Google, AOL, MySpace are all issuers, and Microsoft is in beta) can create and log into a Facebook account using those credentials.