The webmail my ISP uses (a horde IMP, or somesuch opensource thingy) doesn’t play nicely with Firefox. It was broken in 0.9.2 and it’s broken in 1.0PR. Why does it stop in the middle, or miss the start, or something, of the HTML transfer?
The only things I keep IE around for now are Flash amusements and webmail.
I demand that someone who isn’t me fix this. It’s my right as a freeloader.
According to those who should know, Firefox 1.0 (not the preview version, not the beta, not the 0.8, but the real actual version One Point Zero) will be out on November 9th.
PS. I hope they’ve fixed the thing where multiple links on the links toolbar pick up the same icon…
An Israeli net magazine alleges a major security flaw in GMail, that allows hackers to gain access to GMail accounts by “stealing” their logon cookie. Apparently Google has acknowledged the flaw. I guess that’s why it’s still in beta. (via Tracy)
Update 21:00. It’s been fixed. (Thanks Paul)
The Age and SMH have joined News.com in embedding story names in their URLs.
So at The Age before it was
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2004/11/01/1099262789668.html — now it’s
http://www.theage.com.au/news/National/TAB-locks-superglued/2004/11/02/1099262825340.html
News.com used to have stuff like
http://news.com.com/2100-1028_3-5435183.html — but now it’s
http://news.com.com/Fahrenheit+94711+expands+election-eve+pay-TV+airing/2100-1028_3-5435183.html
(Note how the slash in the News.com article screws-up the text embedded in the URL.)
It’s probably good for the search engines but it’s hopeless for passing URLs via email, as they now spill out over more than one line.
(If they want to maximise hits, what the Fairfax should prioritise is countering Google News’s opinion of The Age and SMH being subscriber only.)
PS. Thursday 8am. For those of us who want to quote SMH/Age URLs to people, you can still chop out all the embedded text, and replace it with “articles” so the example above becomes: http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2004/11/02/1099262825340.html
I was adding The Tragically Hip‘s ‘Trouble At The Hen House’ to Itunes when a dialogue box popped up. Damn, I’d forgotten it was a Hyper CD but the true horror came when I read what was on the box.
‘Do you want to install Netscape 4.08?’
Almost as scary as ‘Do you want to play a game of thermo nuclear war?’.
It pays to keep your URLs clean. Preferably just directories, no trailing filenames, and certainly no default.aspx type stuff on the end. Why? Because you’re aiming at humans, most of whom can’t remember that kind of stuff, and don’t want to be bothered typing it.
Everything that Jakob Nielsen wrote five years ago still applies. You want URLs that are memorable, easily typable, short enough to send in emails without getting chopped-up, that don’t automatically add weird parameters screwing up bookmarks and browser autocomplete, and can be passed by word of mouth.
Hey Joe, look at this site. www dot geekrant dot org
wins over
Hey Joe, look at this site. h t t p colon slash slash w w w dot geekrant dot org slash index dot php
every time.
This stuff is not hard. For Apache people, .htaccess works wonders. For the IIS crowd, fiddle with the default page settings. There is no excuse for www.microsoft.com/windows forwarding to www.microsoft.com/windows/default.mspx. Anybody who bookmarks that will be in for a shock the next time they move to a new scripting technology and change their file types.
Hide the default/index.html/asp/aspx/cgi/php/whatever from your users by linking back to your index pages without using the filename… eg root of this directory “./”, parent directory “../” and so on. Also aids in what Nielsen calls “hackable URLs”.
Redesign them by all means, give your 404s options to go to the home page, or search, or a site map. But don’t make your 404s jump to special page, changing the URL. Do you know how irritating it is to get a 404 that’s hidden what you typed, so you don’t know what you got wrong?
Though it’s become kinda fashionable to chop it, I still lean towards including www on the front in URLs, because it means you can put it in written form without the http:// and there’s no doubt what you’re talking about.
PS. Which browser vendor will be the first to hide http:// in the address bar when it’s not needed? Newbies really don’t need to be trying to type that every time, especially as no browser requires it to be entered.
PPS. Yeah I still call them URLs, not URIs. As the W3C says, an http URI is a URL. So there.
At the time of writing, my main blog is under a sustained comment spamming attack. Over 50 spam comments today, all targeting the one old post, promoting a poker web site. At least one other WordPress-based blogger is getting them, so it’s not just me. And what’s interesting is they’re from a variety of different IP addresses, so assuming that’s not spoofed, it looks like the attack is coming from multiple zombies.
(Links in text deleted)
Author : poker (IP: 195.172.182.228 , 195.172.182.228)
E-mail : byob@y7263o.com
URL : http://www.poker-w.com
Whois : http://ws.arin.net/cgi-bin/whois.pl?queryinput=195.172.182.228
Comment:
7263 JUST A FEW LINKSFOR YOU TO CHECK OU WHEN YOU GET A CHANCE
Online poker
texas holdem poker
texas hold em
When I first saw this type of comment spam, I thought huh? What’s the point? Who is going to see such comments and click on them? Particularly in this case, with dozens of the same spams hitting one particular post. But the point is getting links to your sites into the search engines, and up the rankings. Whether it works or not I don’t know.
WordPress has a fair bit of flexibility when it comes to catching comment spam. The most useful generic setting is number of links in a comment. A surprising number of comment spams have heaps of links. You can also nominate keywords (though in 1.2 there was a bug in that if the final keyword on the list had a CR after it, every comment got caught). Caught comments go to moderation, so the never see the light of day. Handy for comment spam and for moderating particular users/IP addresses too.
Comment spammers, like other spammers, are getting cleverer. Hopefully the blogging community (and in particular those who write and update blogging software) will stay one step ahead of them.
Update Friday 07:30: The attack appears to be widening to more blog posts, and branching out to Viagra and weight-loss, but is still showing signs of being from the same source. To counter it, I have shutdown comment posting on entries more than 60 days old using Scott Hanson’s Auto Shutoff Comments plugin.
Defined: Wikipedia on blog comment spam.
Possible solution for WP?: Modification to comments code that ensures it can only be called from the form, not remotely. I’ll try this when I get the chance.
Update Friday 13:00: The patch above doesn’t work for this particular attack. Looks like this one spoofs the referrer… which makes sense, any decent spammer would think of that.
For anybody who dabbles in GeoCities, they’re doing a little cleanup which means rarely accessed or updated sites may get the flick:
“We noticed that you haven’t updated your web site in a while. If you wish to keep your web site, we encourage you to update it within the next 30 days so that it will not be deleted due to inactivity. If your web site is deleted, visitors will no longer be able to access your web site and all files will be permanently deleted.”
I took a look at my site (which has bugger all on it) and got this warning:
If you’ve got a site you occasionally glance at, now would be a good time to tinker a bit. And grab a copy of whatever’s on it, if you don’t already have it.
Who’s winning this time round? Is Firefox having any impact?
Here’s the stats for my most heavily trafficked site, top 15 agents:
| Hits | Percent | User Agent |
|---|---|---|
| 30815 | 11.88% | Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows 98) |
| 23816 | 9.18% | Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1) |
| 14375 | 5.54% | Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; .NET CLR 1 |
| 10701 | 4.12% | Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1) |
| 8880 | 3.42% | Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET |
| 8330 | 3.21% | Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows 98) |
| 8092 | 3.12% | Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0) |
| 6784 | 2.61% | Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Yahoo! Slurp; http://help.yahoo.com/ |
| 5190 | 2.00% | Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/2004 |
| 5144 | 1.98% | Program Shareware 1.0.0 |
| 4832 | 1.86% | Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0; .NET CLR 1 |
| 3825 | 1.47% | Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko |
| 3314 | 1.28% | Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko |
| 2982 | 1.15% | Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; FunWebProd |
| 2362 | 0.91% | Atomz/1.0 |
Interesting that after all these years, IE5.5 is still the top hitting browser.
Gecko is Firefox and Mozilla and their derivatives. Probably a few copies of Netscape 7 floating around as well.
Atomz and Yahoo are spiders, obviously, though I’m not sure why Yahoo decided it would be good to tell us their spider is Mozilla compatible, ‘cos I bet it isn’t. Google comes through every so often, but doesn’t appear in the top 15 provided by my web site’s default report.
I have no idea what “Program Shareware 1.0.0” is. Any ideas, anybody?
No sign at all of Mac users, or indeed any OS other than Windows. Maybe if the list showed the top 50…
Getting these into some basic groups, we have:
| Hits | Percent | User Agent |
|---|---|---|
| 82008 | 31.60% | MSIE 6 |
| 30815 | 11.87% | MSIE 5.5 |
| 12329 | 4.75% | Gecko |
I could show you the two party preferred figures, but I scarcely need to: IE still rules the roost, though I’d bet Gecko/Firefox is slowly gaining momentum.
(Obviously I’m going to have to look beyond the top 15, because there must be an awful lot of minority combinations of OS/browser out there.)
It’ll be interesting to see how this pans out over the next few months.
GMail is still in beta, so little changes creep in now and then. Haven’t seen this one before: a warning on what is actually an innocent message.
As it happens, the Learn More link wasn’t very helpful, just going to some stuff describing how to recognise a scam.
Just when I thought I could get away they drag me back in again.
I recently posted about Copernic Desktop Search, well a day later and Google have released ‘Puffin’ – Google Desktop Search. It too seems IE-centric in that it only index IE history, surely Google should realise a good deal of early adopters will be using Firefox?
Even though I’ve set up Copernic to search my OneNote files I guess I’ll download Google’s offering and see how it stacks up.
UPDATE
I read somewhere today that Puffin was the code name for Google Search Bar, not Google Desktop. No matter what it’s called I still can’t use it.
Back when IE4 came out, Microsoft trumpeted the integration of the Web and the desktop. Active Desktop, remember that? One of the other things they did was to make Windows Explorer look a bit more like the Web, and make Internet Explorer capable of doing Windows Explorer-type things.
I was doubtful that it was very helpful, but in any case they went too far. We now have the ridiculous situation of Windows Explorer showing the following message if you try to go manually (eg by typing) to a path that doesn’t exist.
The path doesn’t exist. Adjusting my browser settings is not going to help.
Refreshing or trying again later is not going to help.
Checking my Internet connection settings is not going to help, nor is getting Windows to do its magical check of my connection settings.
Checking if I have 128-bit security it’s definitely not going to help, for F’s sake.
Click the Back button? Try another link? I wasn’t clicking on a link!
And it says it can’t find a server, or had a DNS error. Bullshit. WhatTF use is that?
(This was in Windows 2000/IE6. Have they fixed this in Windows XP?)