Category Archives: Web pages

Nine newspapers: one for all

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Nine Entertainment’s major Australian newspapers, The Age, Sydney Morning Herald, and Brisbane Times, have a soft paywall. You can get some articles for free; some are only for paying customers; and some fall somewhere in between, with them granting complimentary access to a few, before asking for money.

This post is not to tell you about various ways of bypassing the paywall if you don’t have a subscription.

But if you have a subscription to one of these, then you can get access to the other two.

I subscribe to The Age, but sometimes hit the paywall when trying to read SMH or BT articles.

In fact sometimes the links within Age articles are sloppy, and point to SMH. Ditto some of the social media shares I see that are from people who I know to be Age readers. I think there’s something dodgy in the app or web site that sometimes spits out an SMH link.

Then I noticed the articles on each site are replicated to the others. If there’s an smh.com.au/whatever/article URL that I can’t read, simply changing it to theage.com.au/whatever/article works. Same with brisbanetimes.

Not too hard to do this by hand in the browser, but it can also be done automatically with a browser plugin such as Redirector.

I wanted it to preserve the SMH or BT home pages, so I can see what the Sydney or Brisbane headlines are. So I added an exclusion for that.

It just about works, with the caveat that if browsing the SMH or BT home page, you need to right-click and open link in a new tab for Redirector to kick-in with the modified Age URL.

Import the JSON config I’ve listed below, or write your own. 

{
    "createdBy": "Redirector v3.5.3",
    "createdAt": "2024-11-12T04:20:41.494Z",
    "redirects": [
        {
            "description": "SMH to Age",
            "exampleUrl": "https://www.smh.com.au/technology/shameful-tech-council-facing-questions-over-richard-white-saga-20241025-p5kla6.html",
            "exampleResult": "https://www.theage.com.au/technology/shameful-tech-council-facing-questions-over-richard-white-saga-20241025-p5kla6.html",
            "error": null,
            "includePattern": "https://www.smh.com.au/*",
            "excludePattern": "https://www.smh.com.au/",
            "patternDesc": "",
            "redirectUrl": "https://www.theage.com.au/$1",
            "patternType": "W",
            "processMatches": "noProcessing",
            "disabled": false,
            "grouped": false,
            "appliesTo": [
                "main_frame"
            ]
        },
        {
            "description": "Brisbane Times to Age",
            "exampleUrl": "https://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/business/companies/abc-to-slash-dozens-of-jobs-ahead-of-restructure-20230615-p5dgoe.html",
            "exampleResult": "https://www.theage.com.au/business/companies/abc-to-slash-dozens-of-jobs-ahead-of-restructure-20230615-p5dgoe.html",
            "error": null,
            "includePattern": "https://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/*",
            "excludePattern": "https://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/",
            "patternDesc": "",
            "redirectUrl": "https://www.theage.com.au/$1",
            "patternType": "W",
            "processMatches": "noProcessing",
            "disabled": false,
            "grouped": false,
            "appliesTo": [
                "main_frame"
            ]
        }
    ]
}

Hopefully this is useful to others who subscribe to one of these sites.

Setting up a public facing webserver behind a Netcomm NF18ACV

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Note: this will move your Broadband Router’s web-configuration to an unexpected port :8080, instead of the :80 your browser expects.

Navigate to Management | Access Control | Services then disable the WAN side HTTP service (why would you even expose this?), change the port for the LAN side to the Alternate HTTP port of 8080, and hit Apply/Save.

Navigate to Advanced Setup | NAT | Virtual Servers and hit Add. Select the correct interface, fill in the other details including the Web Server’s LAN address, ensure you’ve got Status: Enabled for the port forwarding, and hit Apply/Save.

Run up a trial HTTP server using something like
sudo python -m SimpleHTTPServer 80
and check for access from outside. Kill the server, because that isn’t safe for production use.

How to block notification requests in Chrome

Oh the irony.

Anyway, the steps:

  1. Go to Chrome Preferences
  2. Advanced
  3. Site settings (or “Content settings”)
  4. Notifications
  5. Click the “Ask before sending (recommended)” switch off. It should then say “Blocked”

Yeah it’s a counter-intuitive caption on that button. It implies that switching it off will just drown you in a sea of unwanted notifications without asking you.

But it seems to work.

Update 2023: It’s moved a bit, so now try:

  1. Chrome Settings
  2. Search for Site Settings
  3. Default behaviour: Choose “Don’t allow sites to send notifications”

If you use Firefox or Safari, this How To Geek article covers those. The article notes that Edge doesn’t currently have an option to turn them off for good.

Flickr’s new HTML code embedding – how to remove the header and footer

Flickr has altered its default embed HTML to include a header and footer, which includes Flickr branding and the title of the picture.

PT in the Sense8 titles 01

Sometimes I suppose this is okay, but sometimes I just want the picture.

Fortunately it seems to be relatively easy to get rid of. In the example above:

<a data-flickr-embed="true" data-header="true" data-footer="true" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/danielbowen/19038778583/in/dateposted/" title="PT in the Sense8 titles 01"><img src="https://farm1.staticflickr.com/313/19038778583_3149e7e01a.jpg" width="500" height="282" alt="PT in the Sense8 titles 01"></a><script async src="//embedr.flickr.com/assets/client-code.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

…remove the data-flickr-embed, data-header, and data-footer attributes of the a href, and remove the script tags, like this:

<a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/danielbowen/19038778583/in/dateposted/" title="PT in the Sense8 titles 01"><img src="https://farm1.staticflickr.com/313/19038778583_3149e7e01a.jpg" width="500" height="282" alt="PT in the Sense8 titles 01"></a>

The result should be just the photo, with the usual linking back to Flickr.

PT in the Sense8 titles 01

It’d be nice if they made this a built-in option when generating the HTML code.

Of course, it also makes me ponder if I should be finding another photo host.

Update 2015-07-20: They seem to have modified their default embedding code a bit so the branding and picture details now only appear over the photo when you mouse over it. Not so objectionable.

PT in the Sense8 titles 01

Flickr’s modified code now excludes data-header="true" data-footer="true" which presumably added the header and footer.

Unhelpful web help

Just… just… wrong. So wrong.

FlickrHelp
Firstly, note the error message “Enter a valid email addresss”. Where, pray tell, ought I do this?  Why do I need to upload any attachment again?  Why do I have to prove I’m a human time-after-time, when all I’m doing is wrestling with your completely broken attempt at a web form?

Have they noticed that no-one is submitting help requests via this form, what with its refusal to accept said requests?

Dear Flickr: stop sucking balls.

Allow more JavaScript, maintain privacy

I’ve long regarded JavaScript in the browser to be one of the biggest security holes in web-browsing, and at the same time the Internet works less and less well without it. In 2008 Joel Spolsky made the observation that for some people the Internet is just broken:

Spolsky:   Does anybody really turn off JavaScript nowadays, and like successfully surf the Internets?

Atwood:   Yeah, I was going through my blog…

Spolsky:   It seems like half of all sites would be broken.

Which is not wrong.  Things have changed in the last five years, and now the Internet is even more broken if you’re not willing to do whatever random things the site you’re looking at tells you to, and whatever other random sites that site links off to tell you to, plus whatever their JavaScript in turn tells you to. This bugs me because it marginalizes the vulnerable (the visually impaired, specifically), and is also a gaping security hole.  And the performance drain!

Normally I rock with JavaScript disabling tools and part of my tin-foil-hat approach to the Internet, but I’m now seeing that the Internet is increasingly dependent on fat clients. I’ve seen blogging sites that come up empty, because they can’t lay out their content without client-side scripting and refuse to fall back gracefully.

So, I need finer granularity of control.  Part one is RequestPolicy for FireFox, similar to which (but not as fine-grained) is Cross-Domain Request Filter for Chrome.

The extensive tracking performed by Google, Facebook, Twitter et al gives me the willys. These particular organisations can be blocked by ShareMeNot, but the galling thing is that the ShareMeNot download page demands JavaScript to display a screenshot and a clickable graphical button – which could easily been implemented as an image with a href. What the hell is wrong with kids these days?

Anyway, here’s the base configuration for my browsers these days:

FireFox Chrome Reason
HTTPSEverywhere HTTPSEverywhere Avoid inadvertent privacy leakage
Self Destructing Cookies “Third party cookies and site data” is blocked via the browser’s Settings, manual approval of individual third party cookies. Avoid tracking; StackOverflow (for example) completely breaks without cookies
RequestPolicy Cross-Domain Request Filter for Chrome Browser security and performance, avoid tracking
NoScript NotScripts Browser security and performance, avoid tracking
AdBlock Edge Adblock Plus Ad blocking
DoNotTrackMe DoNotTrackMe Avoid tracking – use social media when you want, not all the time
Firegloves (no longer available), could replace with Blender or Blend In I’ve have had layout issues when using Firegloves and couldn’t turn it off site-by-site

Convert an Access table to a Wiki table

Copy/paste entire table or query into Notepad++

Replace newlines: \n
with: \n|-\n|.

Then replace tabs: \t
with: \n|.

(In the above two replaces, period = space)

You should end up with a structure like this:

|-
| data line 1, value 1
| data line 1, value 2
|-
| data line 2, value 1
| data line 2, value 2

Then you need to add the table header to the top – in this case I’ve gone for sortable columns:

{| class=”wikitable sortable”
|-
! scope=”col” | Value 1
! scope=”col” | Value 2

…and the footer for the bottom:

|}

That should be about it.

More info on Wiki tables

Remote server frustration

I can understand the principle of locking down web browsers on server machines, but there should at least be a straightforward way of overriding it.

The other week we were connected to a remote server trying to debug some ASPX code. That’s remote as in: on another continent, and not using the fastest connection. (It was designed to be fast for a remote population of users, not us.)

A good way to debug the code without switching on debug errors for everybody is to RDP onto the box and browse it from there.

This didn’t work because, despite Windows 2008 IE ESC (Internet Explorer Enhanced Security Configuration) not being enabled, it was blocking cookies, and every option I could find to try and turn it back on was either disabled, or did nothing.

‘Cos you know, browsing localhost (which has your own code on it ferchrissake) is a terrible security risk. Sigh.

In a rush to resolve it, we eventually resorted to downloading and installing Firefox on the machine. (I love Chrome, but its automatic updates and things scare me slightly; probably not good for a server. Some day I’ll dig around and figure out if it can be turned off. Come to think of it I should make sure FF doesn’t do the same thing.)

Firefox brought its own problems. Straight after installation, it decided to load up some hideously slow (on this less than ideal link) page with video. No, actually, two pages — using two tabs — and despite it proclaiming how fast and responsive it is, wouldn’t respond. Blargh. Thanks a bundle, Mozilla.

It must have taken a minute or more to come back — a long frustrating time when you’re in a hurry.

This solution did, however, work — we could finally see the debug messages, thank goodness.

Is there an official way of getting IE to behave itself?

Census night is coming

The census delivery chick turned up and offered us the option of paper or electronic form.

Two programmers looked at each other, thought about how they value their time and the response was a no-brainer:

“We’re programmers,” I explained, “we’ll take the paper form.”

“There’s a phone number you can call if you have any trouble filling out the electronic form” reassures the collector.

Cathy thinks: “Sure, that line won’t have any trouble when twenty million Australians simultaneously log into the web site to fill in the forms via a broken SSL link, using IE specific controls (that only work under some versions Windows assuming they’re correctly patched and have the right libraries loaded), demanding full round-trips to the underspec’d Windows servers to populate unnecessarily complex custom controls, some of which will no doubt demand Flash or COM. Come to think of it, it probably won’t even be web based, and we’ve only got two Windows boxes, one of which is tucked under a table (Yay! Census night on the floor swearing at the ABS’s programmers!) and the other has a screen resolution that went out with buggy whips (I’ve had programs barf and refuse to run because the resolution was unacceptable).”

We chose paper. For another view of the world, I’m looking forward hearing to how census night worked for Daniel…

Is Django MVC doing it wrong?

I’ve just starting fooling around with Django (a Python web framework), and was looking to produce a form. Bear in mind that Django doesn’t really do MVC, but follows the philosophy – separation of logic, representation and appearance:

class BookForm(forms.Form):
    title = forms.CharField()

def BookView(request):
    form = BookForm()
    return render_to_response('book.html', {'form': form})

With boot.html containing (amongst other things):

<form action="" method="get">
{{ form.as_table }}
<input type="submit" value="Search" />
</form>

Which is great! MVC, separation of data, presentation and business logic. Now, how do you get a CSS class onto that title field? CSS, being the way of separating out the presentation part of a HTML page from the data that’s embedded in it? As above, but chuck it in as such:

class BookForm(forms.Form):
    title = forms.CharField(
        widget=forms.TextInput(attrs={'class':'title-field'}))

Seeing this crunched the gearbox in my mind. All that messy designer stuff, where they make things look nice, that’s worming it’s way into my business logic? Perhaps it’s not so wrong, as the business logic does indeed know that this is a title-field. But it doesn’t quite sit right with me. I’m not convinced it’s wrong, but if you were, you could instead do this in your CSS and HTML:

<style>
.title-field input {background:#ccC68f;}
</style>
<form action="" method="get">
<table>
<tr><td class="title-field"> {{ form.title }} </td></tr>
</table>
<input type="submit" value="Search" />
</form>

Which pretty much forces you to individually place fields — you get to specify the order of fields plus their individual CSS classes.

I’m not sure what the answer is here. Anyone care to enlighten this noob? Bear in mind that there’s a thing to magically tie a model to a form meaning you don’t even need to specify the fields in both the form and model, which you can’t use if you start tossing styles into each field.