Yabfog

This site (and Optimalbrowser.com) will be likely be intermittently available starting this evening (U.S. Eastern time) and lasting for a day or so while I move servers.

I just saw some weird traffic on this blog. Last week, I was testing a plugin when it went a little haywire and automatically created a bunch of posts (based on my NewsGator clippings, including a lot of law related and gadget related topics -- things I read about but don't write about). And then because I have Alex King's twitter tools installed, each of those new posts was propagated to twitter, too.

Now, I thought that this little stunt probably would have pissed people off. Instead (maybe), I saw a huge spike in traffic to this blog -- more than three times the usual traffic.

I'm assuming that these "visitors" were just bots that were monitoring the twitter public timeline, but the referrer logs don't back that up (although that doesn't necessarily mean anything).

Tom Morris is pulling his hair out dealing with XML character encoding issues. I've gone through this myself. I found that the SimplePie feed parser has great logic for dealing with this, so I adapted it to my needs in my PHP class XMLParseIntoArray. I think I've expanded on SimplePie's approach a bit, but it's still a work in progress. YMMV. Hope this helps.

Just finished installing Fedora 8 on one of my machines, only to find that one of my favorite tools, FreeNX (a VNC-like remote desktop protocol), would not work.

Turns out Fedora 8 ships with a known bug. More info here. PITA.

Brian Breslin, of Twitbin, left a comment saying that Twitbin fixed the security flaw I previously pointed out. Cooool!

UPDATE: FIXED. See the comments below.

A couple weeks ago, I installed twitbin, a Firefox extension that loads twitter in a sidebar. But, I just happened to be checking my browser cookies, and I noticed that my twitter username and PASSWORD were stored in my browser cookies in plaintext! This is not even a session cookie -- it is persistent, with a one-year expiration.

Are you kidding me?! Twitbin -- uninstalled.

"[I]t is never appropriate for cookies to contain plaintext user names and passwords." [The World Wide Web Security FAQ]

The New York Times is doing a lot of great things with its website and RSS feeds. But somewhere along the way, they've introduced a bug in their code that generates the RSS feed for the home page.

The bug is that the channel title switches back and forth between "NYT > NYTimes.com" and "NYT > Home Page". This alternates at least once an hour, all day long (as near as I can tell). This constant switching causes one of my feed readers (FeedDemon) to alert me of the change every time it occurs. Of course this latter point is not directly the Times's fault, but it is driving me insane.

Screenshots to prove that I'm not already insane:

If you look closely at the raw RSS feeds, you will notice that they appear to be using two different tools to generate the same feed. So I guess the two tools are not configured exactly in sync with one another.

Just finished upgrading to WordPress 2.3. Went off without a hitch -- even converted my categories to tags. I did have one issue with that, though. For some reason, certain posts were marked "Uncategorized" while other retained only my default "Miscellany" category. I couldn't detect the pattern. I had to "hand" edit the database to finish cleaning that up.

Other issues so far: I'm getting blank pages after form submissions in the admin interface (UPDATE: caused by having no categories ). Also, I notice that the Blogroll > Import Links panel uses the wrong taxonomy category to obtain the list of blogroll categories.

In response to Dave's proposal to add an expanded attribute to the OPML 2.0 spec, I have the following thoughts.

1. Typo: "Its optional" should be "It's optional"
2. As a general matter, I'm not convinced that this belongs in the spec. It seems to me that display properties are the application's problem, not the file format's. Others have complained about the expansionState element for the same reason -- of course, that's a spec legacy and eliminating it would cause breakage so I'm not suggesting eliminating expansionState. But why further muddle the OPML spec? If a particular application needs to store the expansion state on a per node level, then why not create a new namespace attribute (or use an existing one)?
3. If the expanded attribute is added to the OPML spec, I suppose there will be a forumlaic relationship between it and the expansionState element. In other words, given a certain expansionState state, I will be able to calculate the expanded attribute for each node, and vice versa. Query:
   • If expansionState is given, may a processor ignore the expanded attributes?
   • If expanded attributes are given, may (or must) expansionState be given?
   • Is it a validation error if both expansionState and expanded attributes are given, but they are inconsistent with one another?

My 2 cents.

Just finished listening to the The Traneumentary podcast. Fantastic! 33 episodes in all. Subscribe