This utterly rocks, and I can’t believe I didn’t go looking for something like it before: MagpieRSS lets you show RSS headlines on a PHP page. I’m using it on my old toxiccustard.com page to show the latest headlines from my diary and the site’s News and Guide to Australia pages (which all run WordPress). It includes caching so you won’t burn up your (or anybody else’s) bandwidth by grabbing the feed continually.
Category Archives: Internet
W3C: “I am the law”
Web sites must be accessible, under pain of having your ass sued off.
So no more Flash only websites, or implementing everything as images.
Latest trackback spam
Oh great, so now we’re getting trackback spam which is linking to Google searches of random garbage, such as http://www.google.com/search?q=pzzfxcus. Which, if you’re wondering, finds nothing.
Bizarre-O.
GMail drowns in spam
It seems the spammers now have the edge over GMail’s antispam algorithms. It appears to be down to spam that contains lots and lots of random text, with an image containing the actual ad. (If enough spammers generate random text for long enough, will one of them eventually send Shakespeare to somebody?)
I’m not sure how many have been arriving, but there’s certainly a large number sneaking through into my Inbox, and counting those that consequently get thrown (by me) there, the Spam Folder now contains over 6500 spam, going back about a month (which is how long Gmail holds them before auto-purging).
That makes over 200 per day, which includes those directed at my old email accounts that now get directed to Gmail. Perhaps 20 of those are arriving in the Inbox. Of course, I’d rather they get through to the Inbox than any false positives go to the spam folder.
It’s probably not helped by Google Groups refusing to obfuscate the From address when posting onto Usenet. I don’t know how many addresses still get harvested off Usenet, since most users know full-well to munge their addresses, but I bet it’s quite a few.
15 years of the web
To celebrate 15 years of the web, The Observer highlights fifteen web sites that have changed the world (via Clay).
Not sure about Easyjet, given it’s UK-only, though I suppose along with sites that are now not particularly significant, but were mould-breaking at the time (such as Salon) they have been important trailblazers, with media and travel being two industries revolutionised (or at least turned upside-down and inside-out) by the Net. Ask any travel agent.
Meanwhile Time has what they claim are the 50 coolest web sites.
All this stuff, obviously, is in the eye of the beholder. And the more I think about it, the more I think such lists are pretty pointless. With hundreds of millions, if not billions of people online now, we all have our own priorities for what we want out of the Net, our own places to go. To try and narrow things down to a few dozen “coolest” is, dare I say it, lazy journalism.
Human load balancing
In Australia, footy-tipping (be it for NRL or AFL) is very popular. And every Thursday, the leading footytips web site footytips.com.au sends out a reminder notice, which goes something like “We notice you have not entered your tips for this week!”
It’s an attempt in human load balancing. Footy-tipping is, almost by definition, an activity reserved for Fridays. Discussions around the photocopier/water-cooler/kitchenette invariably take place about the fitness of each team in the competition, the players, the injuries, the stats. Close examination of the Friday morning newspapers reveals more information on how people should tip.
All of which means that for sites like footytips.com.au, they need a lot of server capacity on Fridays, when everyone enters their tips, on Mondays, when people look at the results, and for the other five days of the week they’re quiet.
In a way I can understand them wanting to encourage tips entry earlier than Fridays… but it goes against the whole culture of it. Nobody wants to enter their tips on Thursdays. And we all want to look at the results on Mondays. No amount of nagging people to do otherwise is going to work.
Maybe they can find some other application which is really busy from Tuesday to Thursday, and on the weekend, and share their infrastructure?
Web site glitch
The Herald-Sun (and most of the News Ltd properties) vastly improved their web site a week or two ago. But they’re obviously having a few issues this morning…
Ah, I see they’ve fixed it already.
My favourite bug
My favourite bug in Firefox (or at least the thing that irritates me the most), the cropping of long “Title” tooltips, one that I’ve written about before here, has just turned six years old, with one Bugzilla member sarcastically leaving a Happy Birthday message.
Google World Time
Google now has world time. Just enter the location you want to know about, and “time”. (via Dan Warne)
Along with the calculator, metric/imperial and currency conversions, there’s a lot of handy stuff in Google now.
Apparently they even have web search.
Advertising in web addresses
Got a well-known brand? Why bother with consistency? Instead, change its name and/or web address for advertising purposes!
It’s not Yahoo Australia … it’s Yahoo!7
Just when you thought you’d got used to ticketmaster7.com, it’s changed back to ticketmaster.com.au
It’s not bigbrother.com.au, it’s bigbrother.3mobile.com.au
It’s not gmail.com, it’s gmail.google.com (just in case you forget what the G stands for)
Within domains it can be a mess too. Microsoft’s site always makes sure the default pages don’t end in / but instead in whatever their latest web server technology is. It used to be /default.asp, then /default.aspx, now it’s /default.mspx. It must be a nightmare of forwarding, to make sure anybody who has bookmarked in the past still gets to where they want. Go to www.microsoft.com/ie now, and it flickers past about 4 old addresses to get where it’s going.
Once upon a time, www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/default.aspx was the IE page. That one just produces an error now. Idiots.
Google browser sync
I love the idea of Google’s Firefox sync for keeping my bookmarks and so on synced between my work and home computers. It works really well.
But I’m rather less keen on sitting waiting for it to do the update when starting Firefox. Sometimes it seems to take ages. Thankfully you can cancel it if you’re too impatient.
Have your own “Did you mean?”
This guy’s gone to the trouble of finding out how to add “Did you mean?” to your own website’s search.