TileMill is a tool for designers to design and integrate maps with custom data quickly and easily on the web. It is built on the powerful open-source map rendering library Mapnik.

TileMill can also export directly to the SQLite-based MBTiles file format for offline maps. It also gives you full control on style and layout (colors, layers, fonts etc.) to customize maps as per your requirements.

Major Features

• Access datasources on the local filesystem or through Amazon S3
• Manage map layers with file-based datasources (shapefiles, rasters)
• Preview map tiles instantly while editing stylesheets
• Inspect datasource field values and data types
• Export maps to PNG, PDF and MBTiles formats

TileMill is actually intended for cartographer but you can master it with a little effort to design simple maps for your personal usage.

The FriendFeed application is written using a web framework that looks a bit like web.py or Google’s webapp, but with additional tools and optimizations to take advantage of the underlying non-blocking infrastructure.

The framework is distinct from most mainstream web server frameworks (and certainly most Python frameworks) because it is non-blocking and reasonably fast. It can handle thousands of simultaneous standing connections, which means it is ideal for real-time web services.

Tornado has been tested on Python 2.5 and 2.6. To use all of the features of Tornado, you need to have PycURL and (for Python 2.5 only) simplejson installed.