Jul

29

RSS Is Relatively New?

Filed Under Interweb, Work | Leave a Comment

The email was an innocuous “Ooh, shiney!” message. RSS feeds are now available for a status site. However, one thing concerned me….

RSS is a relatively new and easy way to distribute content and information via the Internet.

I personally have been aware of RSS since 2002. However, as I am a relatively late adopter of technology, I was not surprised to learn RSS has been around since July 1999. This technology has been available for nine years. 1999 is the same year IE5 became available. That is a few months before Windows 2000 became available. This is before the technology bust which weeded out much of the Internet craps. (Are we due for another one of those?) Next year we can celebrate the 10th anniversary of RSS. Can we really call it new when we celebrate it being around for a decade?

The point of “relatively” was to soften the word new. I was supposed to be mollified by it isn’t really new but it isn’t really old and is closer to new than old. It just sounded to me like whoever wrote it only heard about RSS within the past two years or so. So maybe the message was more “Ooh, shiney!” for them than for me.

Jul

26

Tumblr

Filed Under Interweb | 3 Comments

I’m not a fan of Tumblr. At the moment I use it for a partial life stream (a chronological aggregated view of your life activities both online and offline - thanks Krynsky). It is just publishing a feed of several of my blogs. It a very limited public view.

The one main thing I dislike about Tumblr is the lack of comments. While my blog doesn’t have a lot of comments, I like that it offers the opportunity. Tumblr not having the opportunity means publishing in a vacuum. Which I think defeats the purpose. So I’d never use Tumblr to replace this or any other blog unless comments appear or comments become less important to me.

A confusing aspect of their service is the “Re-blog”. It wasn’t clear to me for some time items re-blogged were not created by the person doing so. Unlike most other services making life streams, there is not an indicator an item did not originate from another site other than in many cases they are abbreviated and have a link to the source.

I probably will continue to use it for some time to come. It just is not something I use. Stuff just flows there from the places I do use.

Jul

19

Stats

Filed Under Interweb, Metrics / Statistics, Usability / Accessibility | 1 Comment

Dreamhost collects the access and error logs for the web site domains they host for me. The stats are crunched by Analog. The numbers are okay. I much prefer Google Analytics. (Even AWStats is better.) Analog is good enough.

While at Bbworld, Nicole asked me about the hits to her wedding web site. She made it sound like then she and Ashley had the data but just needed to know how to interpret the data? Now a couple days later they didn’t have the data. Instead, they ran into a password issue.

Shell / FTP:

What I had suggested to Nicole was Ashley could find the stats by going to the logs/william-nicole.com to find the data. (Actually it was logs/william-nicole.com/http/html)

Web:

Since, only Ashley’s user can access the stats through the shell / FTP route, I went into my admin panel to add Nicole and myself a user to access the stats. I erroneously assumed the user with access to manage the content (Ashley) would have access to the stats. Instead, Dreamhost only automatically grants the panel user (me) access to stats. Doh! So I ended up creating them both accounts.

Shameless Plugs:

Nicole’s site is http://william-nicole.com/.

Another site I am hosting for Shel is http://artistictraveler.nu/.

Jul

6

Firefox 3 and SSL Certificates

Filed Under Computers, Interweb | Leave a Comment

Apparently LinkedIn.com let their SSL certificate expire this morning. Assuming they really let it expire, this is a big oops. Hopefully, someone in their Production Operations Group has been alerted to the problem and is working on getting a new one.

The screenshot is from Firefox 3. In the old days, Firefox or Netscape used a frustrating pop-up for the user to choose how to handle security certificates which were not properly signed or expired. My first time, it took three readings to make sure I was doing the right thing. Even on my hundredth time, I wasn’t sure I was doing the right thing.

It’s a new day, I guess. Now, a page similar to the handling of HTTP error codes is shown. Useful facts? Good. Plain language? Excellent.

Mar

22

Fall in Love With Cyberbullying

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Kentucky’s Bill HB775 would require those operating web sites or blogs or message boards in the state to enforce a policy to collect legal names, postal addresses, and email addresses to use the service. The legal name would, of course, be posted on the web site. Should the poster cross someone else, then the operators have to hand over to the victim the identity of the poster. First offense at not having the poster’s identity is $500 ($1,000 each thereafter).

A policy to collect the information doesn’t mean the users of the web site must actually provide the information. Though it seems like this law is pointless unless it means the web site must force users to provide the information.

Any universities running a system like Blackboard Learning System Vista or CE editions (possibly others) probably would need to disable anonymous postings in the discussion board. The legal name of the poster would need to be visible. So, the system could not use nicknames the person would be addressed by in a face to face setting.

Universities typically have major difficulty getting students to correctly maintain their postal addresses. This is why many are turning to direct deposit of excess checks and email. This way the school avoids mail returns on thousands of addresses.

Mar

19

Tale of Defeating the Crazy Woman

Filed Under Interweb | Leave a Comment

Babies are fascinated by me. When the two of us are in a room, they often find me the most interesting thing in the room. Usually, it is mutual.

So, a mutual friend of a friend, Mojan has a fantastic blog. The past year or so has been about being pregnant and most recently figuring out how to be a parent for the first time. Well, a crazy woman set up a ‘blog” which hotlinks images from Mojan’s blog and falsely represents the child in the photos. Ick. I offered to help with this identity theft issue.

Once upon a time, I was annoyed with people taking images from my last employer’s web site. Since I was the campus web designer, I created an image which said, “All your image are belong to VSU.” Also, as the web server administrator, I figured out how to defeat hotlinking with .htaccess by using mod_rewrite to give them my annoyance rather than their content. For the next couple days I watched the perpetrators try and figure out what was wrong. The hate mail I got was fantastic! I recommended Mojan do the same. When she agreed, I went researching to do what I did once upon a time. This is the .htaccess file I recommended she try.

# Basics
Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine On

# Condition is true for any host other yours
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\.)?mojansami\.com/ [nc]

# What to change gif, jpg, png to which target. In this case does not exist.
RewriteRule .*\.(gif|jpg|png)$ http://mojansami.com/images/stolenpic.jpg [nc]

My directions were not all that specific. So the next thing I know, her site is sporting an Internal Server Error. *headdesk* She used Dreamweaver to create the .htaccess file and upload it to her site. She reported the file she uploaded disappeared. Eventually, it did occur to me to look for the error.log and see what it said. The log complained about DOCTYPE in the .htaccess file in the home directory. A file which did not show in the FTP listing. So, replacing the bad .htaccess file with a blank one fixed the Internal Server Error.

The .htaccess file in the right place, of course, resolved the issue with the crazy woman hotlinking.

Nothing can fix the pain of another person committing identity theft against you or your loved ones. I really hope Mojan doesn’t become discouraged and abandon blogging entirely. Between moderation and authentication she might find a better balance.

Do you have any stories of online identity theft?

Mar

8

Study Groups Violate Academic Integrity?

Filed Under Interweb, University | 2 Comments

Maybe I need to add a “What were they thinking?” category?

A student created a Facebook group for chemistry students to ask peers for help. As these students already collaborate face-to-face in a study room and use official tutoring services, this was just replicating this online. The students claim to just be helping each other.

So why was the professor upset enough to ask for the student to be expelled? I think it boils down to:

  1. The Internet is used by cheaters.
  2. An invite talked about posting solutions.

Probably like all other cases I’ve seen there is more to the story than what is being reported.

Mar

2

One Feed to Rule Them All

Filed Under Interweb | Leave a Comment

There is a slight difference between FriendFeed and an RSS aggregator? According to the site, “FriendFeed enables you to keep up-to-date on the web pages, photos, videos and music that your friends and family are sharing.” It is using the RSS feeds of the various sites. So, like an RSS aggregator, FF pulls information from various web sites. FriendFeed just ensures this information is associated with individuals.

So… Use my FriendFeed RSS feed to stalk me better. You’ll even not be counted on the FeedBurner tracker. :D

Drop a comment with yours. :D

Feb

25

Mozilla Prism Self-Signed SSL Issue

Filed Under Computers, Interweb | 1 Comment

I have been looking to use Prism. A gotcha I hit was it balked at any site using a self-signed SSL certificate. A recommendation was to copy the cert8.db file from a Firefox  profile to a Prism profile. This actually worked.

Locating it is a bit of a pain in the ass on Windows. It is in what would be a hidden folder, so some layers have to be opened up just to get to it. Copy from <user>/Application Data/Mozilla/profiles/default  to <user>/Application Data/Prism/default.

Excellent. Now it is a fair evaluation.

Jan

28

Misunderstanding Links?

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In running an online class system, we encounter situations where we have to gather data and present to the best of our ability past events. We thoroughly comb through the evidence and carefully present our findings with an admission as to how certain we can be about the evidence. Often the stories about events as told to us sound implausible. Every theory is debunked as best we can, leaving only the what could have happened. No decision of fact is sent along without us being as sure as we can. In many cases, our recommendation is not enough evidence exists to determine the events.

Based on what I have read, I have to wonder if the Gulf Middle School school officials and the Attorney General’s Office made the same careful deliberations for a police officer in Florida to be in trouble over the links on his friends’ page? He even had approval to create the profile on MySpace though run it on his own time. This story just smells. I bet there is more to the story. The story as it has been told doesn’t sound very plausible.

That said, I remember a case where helping a professor in 2005 (who had been teaching online for at least 5 years) asked me, “What is the URL Tool? While you are at it: What is a link?” So, just because people use technology does not mean they understand it.

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