Gadgetopia

Outpost Firewall: This personal firewall blocks outgoing HTTP referrers, which we've discussed before as being a potential security hole. Webmasters just see this in their referrer logs: Field blocked by Outpost (http://www.agnitum.com) It must have to parse the text of the HTTP request and manually modify the line which includes ...

HTTP/1.1: Header Field Definitions: Did you ever wonder why the HTTP_REFERER header is missspelled? (You did know that "referrer" is actually spelled with two "r"'s, right?) It turns out that the misspelling harkens back to the HTTP spec, as linked above. That link is to the 1.1 spec, but in ...

HTTP/1.1: Security Considerations: Regarding my earlier post about the Outlook Web Access privacy issue, here's what I found about HTTP Referer headers in the HTTP 1.1 spec (RFC 2616): Because the source of a link might be private information or might reveal an otherwise private information source, it is strongly ...

Forgive me for stating the obvious, but I got to thinking today about the major protocol and language that drive the Web HTTP and HTML and I reflected on the fact that this pair is essentially frozen in time. There hasn't been a major update to either of ...

Cumulative Security Update for Internet Explorer (832894): Tell me, why is this a good idea? Hasn't this been a standard for a lo-o-o-ong time now? The update removes support for handling user names and passwords in HTTP and HTTP with Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) or HTTPS URLs in Microsoft Internet ...

Spammers are firing off HTTP requests at places they think common email cgi scripts might be ("http://www.domainname/cgi-bin/formmail.pl" for instance). They send this request with parameters designed to send them an email if it finds a unprotected, generic script. If they get an email, then they know the script is there ...

www. is deprecated.: An effort is underway to remove the "www" from site addresses. If you do, you can get a little badge to display on your site. I agree with this it's an idea who's time has come. By default, all popular Web browsers assume the HTTP protocol. ...

Eight Years Of Apache: Apache rules. The Apache Software Foundation today announced that its HTTP Server platform has reached a milestone of eight consecutive years of World Wide Web technology leadership. Since its first release in April of 1995, the Apache HTTP Server has become as pervasive as the Web ...

Mongrel: A Web server written in Ruby. Mongrel is a fast HTTP library and server for Ruby that is intended for hosting Ruby web applications of any kind using plain HTTP rather than FastCGI or SCGI. It is framework agnostic and already supports Ruby On Rails, Og Nitro, and Camping ...

I maintain a web site that runs off of a content management system. The whole deal is database driven, and the content is identified by numeric ID's. I wanted to know which items of content are actually being used on the site so I could get rid of the ones ...

TinyURL.com - where tiny is better!: Make your URLs smaller. I think this is a simple rediection lookup. "By entering in a URL in the text field below, we will create a tiny URL that will not break in email postings and never expires." Entering two URLs immediately after one ...

Usenet Psychic Wars With Wikipedia: This is absolutely hysterical Unable to accept that Wikipedia's policy of presenting a Neutral Point of View means that an article on Sollog would have to include both pro- and anti-Sollog material, and unable to force other Wikipedia editors to accept his version of reality, ...

It's time for applications to start running off of remote configuration files. By this, I mean have applications store their settings in a file they access via an HTTP call, instead of on the local file system. Take NewsGator, for example. At the office, I add and remove subscriptions daily. ...

My buddy Rob sent me a link to an article called "Blogs as Disruptive Tech: How weblogs are flying under the radar of the Content Management Giants," which includes this great anecdote: The convention center was practically empty after the go-go years of the Internet bubble, it seemed crazy to ...

Spammers have sunk to a new low: spamming HTTP referer logs. Now that a lot of bloggers display referer hits, and a lot of bloggers monitor them to see where they're getting links from, spammers have started sending HTTP requests with their site as the referer, just to get people ...

Raw Blog: Authentication in RSS Readers: Here's a handy list of news aggregators that support authentication and the type (HTTP, HTTPS, URL) they support.

Here's something a little scary for anyone who uses Outlook Web Access. Watch out for the links you click in emails, because your browser may send a whole lot of information about you in the HTTP Referer header. Browsing through my log files the other day, I found this as ...

Google Data APIs Overview: All your RSS are belong to Google (that joke never gets old...). GData is a new protocol based on Atom 1.0 and RSS 2.0. To acquire information from a service that supports GData, you send an HTTP GET request; the service returns results as an Atom ...

In a surprise twist, a security flaw has been found in IE's impenetrable armor that allows a trojan to install its payload and monitor for passwords sent over https connections. Your account number? Now it's everyone's account number! Thanks for sharing. A "Browser Helper Object" is a DLL that allows ...

Internet Explorer: Customize the Image Toolbar: You know that little toolbar that appears in Internet Explorer when you hover over an image it lets you save the image or email it or whatever. Did you know you can turn this off in HTML? Or ...

Much like (insert color) is the new black, the URL is the new command line. Sites like whois.sc (who we've mentioned previously), A9, and others let you cut a step out of searching by just firing in your search terms along with the address. No search screen to wade through ...

Here's what I'd like to see for upcoming browsers: customized browser settings on a URL-by-URL basis. I think it's time to admit that different sites sometimes require vastly different browser settings to work optimally. For instance, I visit some sites that scroll horizontally. To see them completely, I need to ...

I could kiss the developers of the Mozilla browser. They just released version 1.1, and with it, another browser finally supports the LINK tag. The LINK tag, you see, was an abandoned HTML tag. It was intended to allow a page developer to describe a page's position in the "big ...

Having purchased a laptop last year, I've stumbled across a few services that will help you recover your prized possession should it fall prey to thieves. They all use a 'phone home' approach to recovering your laptop. When the thief connects his new laptop to the internet it will contact ...

Smarter Image Hotlinking Prevention: Here's a great antidote for hotlinkers people who embed images from YOUR Web site in their page (so they get the image at your bandwidth expense). This system will prevent images from loading in pages not on your site. These fixes aren't uncommon, but this ...

EvilURL: Because Gadgetopia really needed a new URL, and http://evilurl.com/turdspurtvomit hadn't been taken yet. (That URL was the first out of 20 tries that I felt I could print here.)

If you haven't upgraded to Firefox 1.5, then you may still be dealing with those horrible dialog boxes when there's an HTTP or DNS error. The new version has nicely formatted standard pages, like the sample above. I always hated those dialogs, because when a domain wasn't found or something, ...

Google Search: waffles: John Kerry got Google-bombed. Not surprisingly, Wikipedia has an excellent page on Google-bombing that reveals some bombs I didn't know had been dropped. I love this one. If you knew you were getting Google-bombed, couldn't you take some counter-measures? Say a bunch of people linked the term ...

A9.com Search: gadgetopia: A9 has been released. At first glance, it seems to be quite a service. I love how you can type "http://a9.com/searchterm" for the URL I just came up with that same idea for this site within the last 24 hours. I should sue. (With a cryptic, ...

XFN - XHTML Friends Network: I'm working on a spider now to log all the Gadgetopia HREFs and finally find out what you all think of me. XFN (XHTML Friends Network) is a simple way to represent human relationships using hyperlinks. In recent years, blogs and blogrolls have become the ...

The guys over at Reinvented had a really quick thought that got some gears turning in my head. XHTML...is valid XML. And valid XML can be tranformed via XSLT into...different XML. RSS is XML. So, if someone has a well-formed XHTML site, you can publish an RSS feed of their ...

New York Times opens up code: This is kind of cool. It s good to see an organization like the New York Times contribute some stuff to open source. The New York Times likes open source so much so that, as it gradually moves more of its print operations online, ...

PHP Marathon: The PHP Marathon is over. Here was the problem: Build a working tutorial platform for beginner, intermediate, and advanced programmers. (This is very practical and will be used by dotGeek, with credit given to you, the almighty winner.) The overall platform should work a lot like Zend.com sub ...

Hardware maker Belkin has sunk to new lows in marketing strategies; a firmware upgrade on its wireless routers adds the ability for the router to grab a random HTTP connection every eight hours and redirect it an ad for Belkin's parental control option. The Register has an article on it, ...

Comet: Low Latency Data for the Browser: I think the end of the request-response model of HTTP communications is upon us. This reverses Ajax -- using Comet (still not quite sure how it's done), the server can reach out and contact the browser at will. Comet applications can deliver data ...

MozPHP: More and more, PHP is being seen as a command line and application scripting language. "MozPHP is a Mozilla PHP integration package. With MozPHP you can execute PHP scripts in Mozilla directly without the need for a local HTTP server. Currently the integration is one way, i.e. it is ...

Counter-Googling | An emerging consumer trend and related new business ideas: Instead of customers checking you out before doing business with you, apparently you should check out customers before doing business with them so you can provide them with better service. "A real-life Counter-Googling example? The Bel Air Hotel in ...

Recreation.gov: This a great site run by...well, I'm not sure, but it's the federal government in some form. It's a big database of outdoor facilities and activities in your area. What's so geeky about that you ask? Well, they have a Web services API: RecML. You can query the database ...

GetXML Plugin for Movable Type - Staggernation.com: Very interesting plugin for Movable Type. This would let you extend MT with arbitrary data stored as XML somewhere. It might be a hassle for every entry, but I'm running into a problem with this site whereby I'd like to store about six ...

Boycott Microsoft Search!: I guess I don't see the point. "Microsoft is building a Web search engine, and they intend for it to become the industry standard. Given Microsoft's track record during the browser wars, there is every reason to believe the company will again use its monopoly power to ...

Refer 2.01: This looks handy. I always found that browsing the HTTP_REFERER field of my log files was awfully interesting. "Refer is a web application that tracks incoming referrers (visitors who followed a link found elsewhere) to your website. What does it do? An up-to-the-minute list of referrers, in reverse ...

Lycos screen saver attacks spammers: Lycos Europe is offering a screen saver that participates in DDOS attacks against known spam relays when your computer is not being used. Seriously. The program activates whenever a computer equipped with it goes into standby mode, and sends so-called HTTP get-requests to what Lycos ...

What's the deal with comment spam like this: http://www.pornsite.xyz/viagra.html badonkadonkbarker There's always a link to some porno/gambling site and a made-up contraction that makes no sense. The only think I can figure out is that if you Google one of the nonsense words from the posts, you get a bunch ...

This would be a nice thing for search engines to do: give the the position of your result on a click through. So, on every site in a search result listing, include the position of the result in the querystring line. Like this: http://www.gadgetopia.com/?result_pos=4 Then I could check my logs ...

Extension Room :: URIid: I found this via Joe's post on skinning GMail. Very cool extension. Let's you fix little formatting problems with sites you visit frequently. Well thought-out. The URIid extension makes it possible to create CSS rules based on the site you are visiting. This is useful when ...

Opera Web to support file-transfer software: The next version of Opera will apparently include a BitTorrent client. The upcoming Opera 8.0.2, now available in a test version, will try to make BitTorrent downloads seamless, just like any other download using HTTP or FTP for transfers. The exception is the appearance ...

GetXML Plugin for Movable Type: Ouch, this is a good plugin. There's no limit to what you can do with this. This Movable Type plugin implements a set of template tags for retrieving data in XML format and displaying the data on your MT-generated pages. [...] The plugin will work ...

Sometime today, the main RSS feed will be redirected into a byzantive series of channels and will pop out at Feedburner. We're using their MyBrand service, so the actual feed address now is: http://rss.gadgetopia.com/gadgetopia Through MyBrand, they will actually enter you in their DNS, so that URL actually points to ...

AFLAX: Flash developers are striking back against Ajax with Aflax: "Asynchronous Flash and XML." They're slinging heavy FUD. AJAX, especially at the level of Google Maps, is very difficult to get right. If you've got a large team and plenty of dollars, it can be done -- then you have ...

Fastest web language: Interesting thread over on Spolsky's forums on the perennial question: which Web language is the fastest? Some points that jumped out at me (all from different posters): Once you scale up to the point at which performance actually matters, the database is usually the bottleneck. Using efficient ...

HTTP Error 410: Gone: I found this page today when searching for a refresher on the 410 status code. It means gone. Forever. Not just not found right now, but forever more. Gone, baby. We should use status code 410 more. As far as I can tell, it’s the forgotten ...

(Note: this post exists in both written and audio form. They re more or less the same thing, so take your pick. I elaborate a bit more in the audio, since I have a tendency to ramble, but I used the written post as an outline for the audio post, ...

Steve Souders is Yahoo s front end engineer. He s the guy who wrote the article we discussed a few months back which brought us back to all those old tricks that make your Web site load faster. Consider this: say your page takes 700 milliseconds to load from request to final ...

Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Web Site: This is a phenomenal page at the Yahoo! Developers Network about how to speed up pages on the front end. The front end means everything after code execution is complete on the server. As developers, we tend to concentrate on server-side rendering, ...

My loathing for ASP.Net has been well-known in these pages, but part of me has made peace with it. There are some things about ASP.Net that I very much like, and I promise I ll post about them one day. Today ain t that day. I will never accept the stupidity of ...

How I Built a Web 2.0 Dating Site in 66.5 Hours: Someone built this site in 66.5 hours using CakePHP, about which I hear a lot of buzz these days. Let this be a testament to Web 2.0 and the effectiveness of rapid development frameworks: I built a full-featured dating ...

I was looking through the MonoRail project today, and I found this little nugget: [...] Developers that were introduced to Web development using pure WebForms also lack the basics http protocol concepts required to use MonoRail (or any other web framework for that matter). I've been working with ASP.Net a ...

Cross-Site Request Forgeries: An interesting article about a vulnerability that's probably present in a lot of apps. [...] cross-site request forgeries, a style of attack that lets an attacker send arbitrary HTTP requests from a victim user. That's worth reading a couple of times, and it will likely not be ...

Rhapsody is giving away music. I was able to listen to a dozen full-length songs today with no cost and no catch. According to this article at O'Reilly, anonymous users can listen to 25 songs per month (but no free repeats -- the same song twice counts as two songs). ...

We've talked before about some of the crazy search engine positioning we get on this site. The GoogleBot loves us. In particular, this page is second on Google for the term "bitlord," behind only BitLord's own site. I don't know how it happened, it just did. This weekend, we got ...

Move over, AJAX. Microformats are the new 'it' technology: Designed for humans first and machines second, microformats are a set of simple, open data formats built upon existing and widely adopted standards. Instead of throwing away what works today, microformats intend to solve simpler problems first by adapting to current ...

Yesterday on Kim Komando's radio show, they had some adverts about BigString.com, an e-mail service that makes some pretty astounding claims about messages sent using a BigString account: Recallable Email, which can be erased, edited, recalled or even have attachments and images "swapped out." Self-Destructing Email. Don't let your email ...

I've been monitoring the 404s on this site. I changed our URL pattern a while back, so I have a page that catches all the 404 and resolves the old pattern against the new one, then redirects. Anything that doesn't resolve gets logged and I have an RSS feed where ...

I changed the URL scheme of this Web site over the weekend. I had been meaning to do it for a while, but some problems with Movable Type 3.2 kind of forced the issue. (I have got to stop rushing into every beta that presents itself...) To make everything backwards ...

Cybercrooks lure citizens into international crime: This an interesting article about how crooks are duping people into helping them use information they've phished for. We all understand how they get the credit card information from email scams, but this is a good look at what happens to it after that. ...

When you're building a big Web app, oftentimes you get to a point when you need to run some asynchronous batch process. You need to do something at, say, 2 a.m. that doesn't involve a request from a browser. I ran into this problem the other day, and I tossed ...

The Anatomy of a Search Engine: As near as I can tell, this is the original research paper submitted to Stanford by Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page describing a new search tool they made called "Google." In this paper, we present Google, a prototype of a large-scale search engine which ...

I'd like to give a hearty thumbs-up endorsement to the Mac as a productivity tool for developers, but I've found a chink in the 'super-cool-and-usable' armor, and no way to plug it: Subversion integration. Yes, you can absolutely install subversion on a Mac and use it in a terminal. But ...

I'm curious what effect Ajax will have on usability. With this technique, the unspoken nature of Web apps is changing, and apps using Ajax will likely do things that users don't expect. When I first starting using client-side HTTP requests back in 1999 (long before the snazzy name), I did ...

I found a peach of a tool today it was exactly what I was looking for at exactly the right time. We have a central database at my company, and the guys have been bugging me to work up some enhanced printing for it. They want to be able ...

PHP: URL Howto: This is a little known but great feature of the PHP Web site. If you write in a PHP.net URL, like http://www.php.net/links, first this URL is matched against the PHP.net pages. If there is a page named links.php, then you'll get that page immediately. This type of ...

Fusebox Web Application Standard: I read a book on Fusebox a number of years ago, and I found a site using it today which jogged my memory. It's an MVC implementation which was originally written for ColdFusion, but which they've expanded into a language-neutral "methodology": To build a Fusebox application, ...

Related to Joe's post about Microsoft's RSS bandwidth issues, I'm seeing a lot of talk about the blogosphere about an RFC from January 2002: RFC 3229, "Delta encoding in HTTP." The idea behind this RFC is to just send the deltas the changes between a current document and ...

Since everyone but the janitor started blogging at Microsoft, they've been aggregating their blogs into one big honkin' feed that I call The Fire Hose, since reading it is like trying to drink from a fire hose. I find some interesting stories occasionally, but I probably missed 50 since I ...

Funny you should bring up Vermeer Technologies. While trying to beat a Visual Studio web project into working yesterday, I did a little network sniffing to find out what FrontPage and Visual Studio actually do to make things work. I'd always thought it was WebDAV that made them go, but ...

Daring Fireball: Markdown Syntax Documentation: I've been playing around with some of the plugins in the MT3 Plugin Pack. Markdown is a plaintext to HTML convertor, much like Textile. However, there's a philosphy behind it: Readability, however, is emphasized above all else. A Markdown-formatted document should be publishable as-is, as ...

There's a standard way of handling object updates via HTML forms. Generally speaking, when the user selects an object to edit, you populate an HTML form with all the data from the object, post all these fields when the user presses Submit, then update all the fields of the record ...

PHP version 5.0.0 has now officially been released, bringing a large number of long-overdue changes to PHP. The Zend Engine II with a new object model and dozens of new features. XML support has been completely redone in PHP 5, all extensions are now focused around the excellent libxml2 library ...

My business mail server got blacklisted the other day. We started getting consistent bounces from a couple of clients that referenced some odd site. A little poking around revealed that our mail server had been inexplicably identified as an open relay and was on a spam blacklist that the clients ...

A long time ago, in the wee hours of the morning, I made a post to Gadgetopia entitled Fake Escrow Sites. It was a posting about how crooks use fake escrow sites to cheat people out of money. It was just one or two sentences, and it linked to a ...

If you have a four-digit name (or less), there's a new pastime called "Vanity TinyURL." If you remember, TinyURL is a redirection service that cuts down any URL by keying it to a code at the root of the TinyURL site. They're up to four characters now, so you can ...

Movable Type doesn't have a content review system. You can write an entry and leave it in "Draft" status, but no one knows about it unless they go looking for it. In practice, this can be a pain. New authors to Gadgetopia are told to leave their first dozen or ...

I find myself in a constant struggle between accepting Movable Type for what it is, and working to extend it. There are a few cases where I want to do interesting things with entries, but I don t want to hack into Ben s Perl code. I solved this problem by inserting ...

I've been involved with Web development work at my church for several years now. In that capacity, I've been confronted with (1) the huge need churches have for Internet development, and (2) the general inability of churches to pay for it. Good Web development is expensive, and churches have much ...

Content Tools Expanded: Interwoven is doing something with TeamSite 6.0 that has been on my mind for a while now. "...allows content management features, such as workflow and versioning, to be accessed from within Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition and Microsoft Corp. .Net-based applications as WSDL (Web Services Description Language) ...

Here's the problem with taxonomies and content categorization schemes: no one will maintain them. You can set up the greatest content tree or grouping structure in the world, but sooner or later, content authors (yourself included) are going to get complacent. That's because the value-add is on the reader's end ...

Here's something that's slowly making its way through the W3C working groups. CC/PP is a method by which a device browser, PDA, SmartPhone, whatever can describe itself and its user's preferences to a server in the HTTP request. Think of it as a User-Agent string on steroids. The device ...

Reading USAToday.com over a bowl of cereal this morning, I clicked on story about the Columbia shuttle disaster only to get an error about a non-existent domain. I checked the link: http:// cms-preview-site2-t.usatin.usatoday.com/ tech/ news/ 2003-06-04-colu mbia-foam-test_x.htm Looks like a "CMS preview" link accidently made it's way into production. I ...

Persistent URL Home Page: I stumbled across this today. I'm not sure if this is a relic of the Web's past, or if this is still an active project. "A PURL is a Persistent Uniform Resource Locator. Functionally, a PURL is a URL. However, instead of pointing directly to the ...

One of the perennial problems with Web-based content management is that people don t want to code HTML for their formatting. They don t want to surround italic text with the right tags, form IMG tags, write link tags, etc. So there are several WYSIWYG options ActiveX components like Ektron, and ...

Some very interesting news out of Macromedia this morning. They plan to release a lightweight Web editing tool called Contribute that's geared for non-Web developers that need to make changes to Web pages. I'm interested in the possibilities this could open up for the workplace. I'm involved in using content ...

I've always been a big believer in legible URLs. There's nothing more annoying than a URL that stretches into hundreds of characters ever tried to email one of those to a mail client that wraps at 76 characters? Additionally, I've written before about the need to support URL hacking. ...

Note on December 27, 2006 A long time ago (2002-ish), I worked with Documentum. I figured out how to do something, and I posted it as this blog entry. The links to the attached files were broken for a long time, and I would get about one email a month ...

I stumbled across Escapade while looking through the EditPlus Yahoo! group. It's a very (very) lightweight server-side scripting language. It provides for include files, database access, variable assignment and retrieval, and not much else. But I had it installed in about two minutes and I was pulling data from a ...

Does a good looking Web site get used more than a plain one? If so, why? Consider two Web sites: Site A is written in plain HTML / CSS / JavaScript, etc. It s a traditional Web app, well-designed and aesthetically-pleasing, but no attempt has been made to engineer a slick ...

Web developers want one thing: control. HTML is such an imprecise language that building Web pages has continually been a struggle between what we want to do and what the language is capable of. As a result, the short history of the Web has been an exercise in perverting HTML ...