Category: Online

  • Blog bot roundup

    The variety is amazing: here’s a list of various agents, spiders and bots that I’ve culled from my chuggnutt.com logfiles over the last 30 days that have to do with RSS and/or blogs (specifically blogs, not just general purpose spiders like Google’s). These are only the ones I know for sure are blog or RSS related; others in my logs might be also, but aren’t obvious about it.

    Geek types, note that these strings (with wildcards mostly) can be used as-is when identifying HTTP_USER_AGENT.

    • Bloglines: The web-based feed reader/aggregator
    • kinjabot: The (currently) beta bot for the Kinja weblog directory/guide
    • Feedreader: Windows-based feed reader/aggregator
    • PubSub.com RSS reader: Another searchable, web-based aggregator
    • FeedDemon: Windows-based feed reader/aggregator
    • fastbuzz.com: Fastbuzz News is another web-based aggregator that scans news and blogs
    • ORblogs.com-bot and ORblogs-bot: The crawlers for ORBlogs which compile metadata and RSS for the aggregating site
    • SharpReader: Windows-based feed reader/aggregator
    • Technoratibot: Technorati‘s crawler
    • UniversalFeedParser: Mark Pilgrim‘s liberal feed parser which is used in a variety of RSS software
    • Feedster Crawler: Feedster’s RSS spider
    • BlogBot: I think this is Blogdex‘s crawler, but I’m not totally sure
    • BlogPulse: Yet another blog/RSS crawler and indexer
    • Slower, Friendlier Spiders (BlogShares V1.35): The spider for BlogShares, the fantasy share market for blogs
    • NITLE Blog Spider: The National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education‘s spider for their blog census
    • LocalfeedsPageCrawler
    • NusEyeFeedCrawler
  • Zach Braff’s Blog

    I plucked this item out of the ORBlogs ORpost RSS feed last night (originally via Acid-Cookie), and forgot to blog about it: Zach Braff, from Scrubs, has a blog.

    Pretty cool, but what’s off the hook is that the blog’s only been active for about 2 months, but he’s already getting over 1000 comments per entry. Whoa.

  • Al Fasoldt is at it again

    Al Fasoldt is at it again, this time taking on Wikipedia. Remember him? Last year I blasted him for spreading FUD about web technology (“FUD Alert“), and then apologized this year for being so harsh (“Apology“). Well, now more people have caught on: tonight I read from this article on Boing Boing and this article on Joi Ito that Fasoldt has slammed Wikipedia and then taken the low road when someone called him on it: this article from Techdirt has the skinny:

    Rather than take me up on the experiment, or suggest an alternative, he complained simply that the whole idea of Wikipedia was “outrageous,” “repugnant” and finally (in another email) “dangerous,” and therefore he refused to take part in my experiment. He told me that asking him to take part of an experiment that would show how Wikipedia corrected errors “wouldn’t change the danger” of Wikipedia — and mentioned how important it was that teachers everywhere knew what a dangerous tool this was. After this email exchange, he came to Techdirt himself, and commented that, based on what he read here, he was disappointed in our educational system — and proceeded to misquote a poem.

     

    …by refusing to back up his claims, by mis-stating or ignoring nearly everything I said to him and by resorting to misdirection in his arguments, personally, I find Mr. Fasoldt to be untrustworthy — but I suggest you make your own judgment call on that one.

    Now, I’ll be fair, I read Fasoldt’s original article that kicked this off, and I didn’t find it problematic. A little FUD-ish, but hey, that’s what he does. It could’ve stayed civil and turned into a good future article for him. But all this followup?

    Well, I’m just sayin’.

  • Blue Oregon?

    I keep seeing references to a new Oregon-related group blog called “BlueOregon,” purporting to reside at the domain name www.blueoregon.com. However, every time I try this domain, I get a “Future home of a domain” page—i.e., the domain name has been registered, but it’s parked on a generic landing page. (Even ORBlogs is showing content from it.) Is this a joke? Really bad DNS/proxy/caching/something configuration on BendBroadband’s part? What’s the deal?

  • Farking Irritating

    Going through the chuggnutt.com logfiles for the 6th, I noticed that there were suddenly a bunch of hits to the Oobi image I’d posted here a while back from TotalFark. Basically, someone’s linked directly to the image on this server from a high-traffic site.

    Now on the one hand, that’s kind of cool—but on the other hand, I’m a little irritated because TotalFark is a paid subscription site that I can’t access without registering first, which means I can’t just go and see what they’re doing with the Oobi image they’re pulling from me. Does that seem fair? Their site is saving money by sucking an image down over my bandwidth, and on top of that I’d have to pay them additional money to find out why.

    And before someone points out to me that it’s only like 5 bucks to register and I’m therefore a cheap bastard, well, consider this: FARK‘s Terms of Service at the bottom of every page reads:

    Text comments, audioedit submissions, and photoshopped images posted on Fark by registered users may not be reposted or broadcast without the express written permission or license from Fark.com and must attribute Fark.com as the source.

    So if they won’t let people use their images without their permission, then why should I? It’s the principal of the thing.

    Grumble… It might be time to brush up on some Apache rewrite rules…

  • Friendster goes PHP

    An item I saw yesterday but forgot to blog about: Friendster goes PHP. Pretty cool.

    Finally on Friday we launched a platform rearchitecture based on loose-coupling, web standards, and a move from JSP (via Tomcat) to PHP. The website doesn’t look much different, but hopefully we can now stop being a byword for unacceptably poky site performance.

    I haven’t had much of a chance yet to use Friendster to see if it truly is faster, so I can’t personally comment on that aspect. And predictably, this is going to bring all sorts of people out of the woodwork arguing over the relative merits of Java/JSP (which was old Friendster) versus PHP… just look at the comments on the link above to see it already happening. And while debate and disagreement can be healthy and productive, how about a quick reality check to everyone:

    PHP is good. Java is good. Both have their merits and disadvantages. Loudly complaining that [Java|PHP] is the only true way and the other is crap is boring and uninformed.

  • Oregon Trail Diaries

    Here’s a site containing links to the texts of diaries from the Oregon Trail. Interesting stuff; it would be worth collecting it and turning it into a Palm Reader ebook. (If I can find the time.)

  • Finding Invisible Men

    Totally wacky article on Kuro5hin: Using Quantum Cryptography to Find Invisible Men:

    But is it truly a myth, or do invisible men walk among us? And if an invisible man were to be created, how would we detect him and track his movements?

    Invisible man detection has gone a long way, from the clumsy mob actions of a hundred years ago to the sophisticated mob actions of today. The time has come to step into the 21st century with a quantum solution to a threat you’ll never see coming.

  • Wikipedia’s New Look

    Just a quick note here… I saw Wikipedia‘s new look this evening and I have to say, I like it.

  • Détente

    Sam Ruby, in his excellet post Détente:

    The key takeaway here is to beware of anybody who preaches one true format or one size fits all. Each format has its strengths. And none of them are going away any time soon.