I’ve decided to move away from Google Feedburner. I’ve deactivated my FeedSmith plugin, and have submitted changes to the domain name system. I am so glad that I used the MyBrand option when I set up my feeds. So my Feedburner feed which was http://feeds.planetmike.com/planetmikedotcom now refers browsers and feed readers to http://www.planetmike.com/feed/ I set [...]
Archive of posts filed under the Web-design category.
WordPress Theme Directory After Four Months
Last summer, WordPress opened their brand new Theme Directory with a whole bunch of themes. Three themes to be exact (Dum-Dum, Tarski, and Monotone I believe), with less than 1,000 downloads the first day. Four months later, after a lot of steady work by designers from around the world, the directory hosts 680 themes, with [...]
Why is Facebook so slow?
I’ve been exploring Facebook the past few days. Why in the world do the pages load so incredibly slowly? I’ve found lots of people I know, although what are the odds that I might know someone else that went to Virginia Tech? It’s kind of ridiculous to “suggest” to me that I might know someone [...]
Netcraft Oddities
What’s the deal with the phrase “no longer used” at the end of every post to Netcraft‘s blog? It’s been there for as long as I can remember. And why doesn’t Netcraft use www for their web site in their domain? Can you think of any other sites that don’t use www or nothing in [...]
Technorati’s Lame Survey of the Blogosphere
Technorati emailed me today (for the first time since April 2007): Bloggers, Technorati has been tracking the Blogosphere for the past several years through our State of the Blogosphere study. This year we have decided to expand our study beyond the sheer size and characteristics of the blogosphere in order to hear more from you, [...]
I Took It!
And so should you. The 2008 A List Apart Survey for People Who Make Web Sites.
URLFan.com The Latest Content Thieves
I just got a notice via a Google Alert that URLFan.com is stealing the articles from my web site. I’ve submitted a complaint to them. Hopefully I won’t need to file DMCA notices on them. Losers. See Search Engines: Three to Beware at Plagiarism Today for a bit more on this group.
Akismet 30,000th Spam Comment
I just deleted my 30,000th comment spam. I have no idea how high the count would have been had I not put into place several techniques that automatically block bad commenters. Those that fall into my traps don’t even get entered into the Akismet system, and so aren’t counted. (Addendum 9:32pm: The count is now [...]
What Is This? A WordPress Attack Using “PLM”
One of my sites had this very odd entry in it’s log from overnight: (actual URL changed) http://www.example.com/2005/06/24/title-in-here/%2B%25255bPLM=0%25255d%2BGET%2Bhttp:///2005/06/24/title-in-here/%2B%25255b0,16925,26735%25255d%2B-%25253e%2B%25255bN%25255d%2BPOST%2Bhttp:/wp-comments-post.php%2B%25255b0,0,349%25255d If you do the hexadecimal recoding a couple times you end up with: http://www.example.com/2005/06/24/title-in-here/+[PLM=0]+GET+http:///2005/06/24/title-in-here/+[0,16925,26735]+->+[N]+POST+http:/wp-comments-post.php+[0,0,349] And if you assume the plus marks are actually spaces: http://www.example.com/2005/06/24/title-in-here/ [PLM=0] GET http:///2005/06/24/title-in-here/ [0,16925,26735] -> [N] POST http:/wp-comments-post.php [0,0,349] What is this [...]
ShaBlastBot Spider Considered Abusive
While perusing my apache logs, I ran across a lot of requests from a bot with the user-agent of “ShablastBot 1.0″ and all came from the IP address of 67.228.100.141. Reverse IP shows that 67.228.100.138 67.228.100.139 67.228.100.140 and 67.228.100.142 also resolve to shablast.com. One significant problem appears to be it doesn’t correctly parse out feed: [...]
