Archive for February, 2007
MyBlogLog Makes Good on Promises, Releases Updates and Fixes
Posted on February 23, 2007, under Development.
Earlier this week MyBlogLog made a series of promises after an exploit was discovered where you could send someone a request to join their community as a co-author and then automatically approve the request. Today MyBlogLog rolls out a series of updates:
All users now default to only seeing messages from contacts they have made in MyBlogLog. This means that when you log into your account, you may see significantly fewer messages than the last time you were last there. Don’t worry, they haven’t been deleted, just hidden. There’s a button at the top of your message list that toggles between showing messages from your contacts and messages from everyone.
This has several implications on the site:
1) We’re switching back on email notifications for when someone leaves you a message, BUT…
2) When set to “Contacts only” you will only receive email notification when a contact leaves you a message (assuming you have email notifications turned on in your profile).
3) When someone is viewing your profile, they will only see public messages posted by you and your contacts
4) You will always see your own posts when viewing someone else’s profile, even if you aren’t their contact. (We messed this one up initially, so sorry if you weren’t sure if you’d successfully left a message).
This was a serious exploit that definitely needed to be patched, but it’s good to see MyBlogLog still actively being improved after its merger with Yahoo. This was one of the main concerns I had when the news broke. I did not want to see such a great service become the next Measure Map.
P.S. Join my community 
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Google Apps Gets 24/7 Phone Support, What About Google Checkout?
Posted on February 23, 2007, under Development.
Google Apps became a serious product this week, when Google announced they would have a premium pay version. Among the advanced features offered are 10GB of storage per user, and API to integrate with third party applications, email migration tool, and more. The biggest thing that stood out to me was that Google is offering 24/7 support, including phone support. This is a serious step for Google, which before hasn’t really offered phone support for the services it offers.
It brings me back to my horrible experiences with Google Checkout a while back, and how shocked I was that Google did not offer phone support for customers. To make matters worse, email support was delayed by two days to a week. I understand that Google App’s is targeting companies and the enterprise, but Google Checkout is ECommerce. When you are dealing with customers hard earned money, they want a voice on the other end to talk with when things go wrong.
Non-the-less, it’s a huge move for Google and shows that Google not only an advertising company and one more step toward enterprises.
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Microsoft’s New Marketing For Office
Posted on February 22, 2007, under Development.
I saw this over on Break.com and got a kick out of it.
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FeedBurner Releases User Statistics Report
Posted on February 22, 2007, under Development.
FeedBurner this morning released a report that shows the break down of users engagement with the RSS feeds FeedBurner manages. The one that seems to stand out rot many, is Google Reader has dominated the RSS reader market. This is a very surprising finding, as before recently Google Reader did not report the number of subscribers for RSS feeds. Google has 59% of the market (for FeedBurner)! Even more amazing are the small numbers for some of the other big names like NewsGator, Netvibes, and Rojo.
The full report is an excellent read, and Marshall Kirkpatrick over at TechCrunch has a great breakdown of what all the statistics mean.
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Google Spreadsheets to Get Charts, Blogger Violates Terms of Use
Posted on February 22, 2007, under Development.
Garett Rogers with ZDNet has discovered that Google Spreadsheets has the background code for graphs to soon be included in the service. One would have to imagine that ths has always been in the works for Google, as they are in direct competition with Microsoft Excel which has graphs.
What is more interesting to me is that Greg found this by looking at the source code of Google Spreadsheets, which is in direct violation of the Terms of Use that Google puts out.
Subject to the Terms, Google grants you a personal, non-transferable and non-exclusive right and license to use the object code of its Software; provided that you do not (and do not allow any third party to) copy, modify, create a derivative work of, reverse engineer, reverse assemble or otherwise attempt to discover any source code, sell, assign, sublicense, grant a security interest in or otherwise transfer any right in the Software, unless such activity is expressly permitted or required by law or has been expressly authorized by Google in writing.
I am not trying to be a whistle blower, but I did post a comment to the article. Even though these types of things are often looked at lightly but users, when you write for a high profile blog it could land you in some trouble.
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AOL Starts Tacking Ads on Bottom of Emails
Posted on February 22, 2007, under Development.
As of Tuesday, AOL will begin appending a 34 word advertisement for AOL services to the bottom of all emails sent. This tactic has been used in AOL’s webmail service for about eight months, but has now spread to the desktop software as well.
This is not a new thing for free email providers, but definitely an annoying one. I have seem these advertisements throw spam filters out of whack as they increase the spam score for Bayesian spam filters. In my humble opinion, you are not going to get me to sign up for a service by using these types of tactics; instead it only reinforces the reasons I do not use the service. It’s like saying “Hey… you… over her!. Sign up for AOL email services and get a really annoying message at the bottom of all of your emails just like the one you are reading right now.”
What do you think?
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Vista Wallpapers Not Included in the Final Version
Posted on February 21, 2007, under Development.
Hamad Darwish is the photographer that shot the pictures used for the Windows Vista default wallpapers. He released other shots he took during the 2006 photoshoot that did not make it into the final release of Vista. There is also a full interview with the talented photographer.
Very nice work, that makes an excellent background for any desktop.
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WordPress 2.1.1 and 2.0.9 Released
Posted on February 21, 2007, under Development.
The popular blogging platform, WordPress, has released version 2.1.1 with about 30 bug fixes. In addition 2.0.9 also includes security updates as well. Version 2.1.1 h has bug fiixes around encoding, XML-RPC, the object cache, and HTML code. You can download WordPress 2.1.1 from here, and version 2.0.9 from here.
Files changed in 2.1.1 from 2.1:
* wp-includes/post-template.php
* wp-includes/cache.php
* wp-includes/formatting.php
* wp-includes/category.php
* wp-includes/post.php
* wp-includes/version.php
* wp-includes/js/scriptaculous/wp-scriptaculous.js
* wp-includes/js/tinymce/tiny_mce_config.php
* wp-includes/js/tinymce/wp-mce-help.php
* wp-includes/js/tinymce/tiny_mce_gzip.php
* wp-includes/capabilities.php
* wp-includes/cron.php
* wp-includes/functions.php
* wp-includes/bookmark-template.php
* xmlrpc.php
* wp-admin/admin-ajax.php
* wp-admin/admin-functions.php
* wp-admin/custom-header.php
* wp-admin/options-general.php
* wp-admin/edit.php
* wp-admin/index-extra.php
* wp-admin/options-reading.php
Files changed from 2.0.7 to 2.0.9 (version 2.0.8 was tagged for Debian, but never announced):
* wp-includes/cache.php
* wp-includes/wp-db.php
* wp-includes/version.php
* wp-includes/js/tinymce/wp-mce-help.php
* wp-includes/js/tinymce/tiny_mce_gzip.php
* wp-includes/classes.php
* wp-includes/functions.php
* wp-includes/rss-functions.php
* readme.html
* wp-admin/edit-form-advanced.php
* wp-admin/link-import.php
* wp-admin/link-categories.php
* wp-admin/user-edit.php
* wp-admin/options-permalink.php
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Protect Your CSS File From Copycats
Posted on February 20, 2007, under Development.
Even though the web was originally create to be open, times have changed and people want to keep the behind the scenes code just that, behind the scenes. Nice One Studios has a great article on how you can protect your CSS files from copycats. This method could also be easily implemented for other file formats like JavaScript.
This method is not bulletproof, as one could easily get your CSS file from the browser cache; but it will make it a little bit more difficult for the casual people looking to steal your code.
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How To: Take Control of Your Feed With Wordpress
Posted on February 20, 2007, under Development.
I have been displeased with the way that my feeds have been being displayed with some feed readers, plus I wanted to add the tags and related articles to the bottom of each feed. Yeah, I know it’s a bit of a “control freak” thing but some online feeders were making the fonts smaller, and changing around the spacing. I recently changed to full feeds as appose to excerpts, so I want the readers to get the feed the way I put it out. I looked at many third party services that offer some of the features I wanted, but the last thing I want is to incorporate another service into the equation. So I set out to create a simple plug in to do what I wanted. Before getting started it should be noted that I use the Ultimate Tag Warrior plug-in for my tagging and related article needs.
So let’s get started, first I created a new file in my “/wp-content/plugins/” directory called “feedfooter.php”. You can add the necessary header comments so the plug-in has a name and information in the Wordpress administration section.
The I let Wordpress know I have want to get notification of each article being printed out.
My “addFeedFooter” function looks like this, yours could vary. I added a div tag around the whole post that allows me to set the font color, size, and a background if I wanted.
Since Ultimate Tag Warrior only has support functions for printing out tags and related articles, I had to make some modifications to return the HTML instead of printing it out. In the file “ultimate-tag-warrior.php” I added the two following functions:
Logged into Wordpress and enabled the new plug-in, and presto! a customized feed and feed footer like what my feed shows now. One thing to note, if you are using a feed service like FeedBurner it may take a while for your feed cache to be updated.
You can download the whole source code file here.
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