Php

Weblog Comments Near and Far Out

I'm coding this weblog myself in PHP and MySQL, writing software that I will eventually release under the name Wordzilla. A new recent comments sidebar on Workbench makes it easier to follow active discussions on old weblog entries. Running a weblog with open comments attracts some unusual discussions when people using a search engine find familiar names in an old entry. For two years, Workbench has hosted an ongoing soap opera between the current and former spouses of Atlanta ... (read more)

2005/05/12

Extended Pings in Weblog Pinger

RSS support was added to Weblogs.Com this morning, making it possible to send an extended ping message to the service that includes the address of a site's RSS feed. This will make it easier for services that are built atop Weblogs.Com, such as Technorati and GigaDial, to incorporate RSS feeds. I have extended my pinger to support this new feature. Weblog-Pinger, an open source class library for PHP, can send update notification pings over five XML-RPC services that monitor new weblog content. ... (read more)

2005/04/28

Server Attacked at Random

My server has been under attack for three days by a user in Colorado who requested the same URL 8.3 million times (and counting). The user, making simultaneous connections from eight IP addresses in a block controlled by Time Warner Telecom, requested a URL on URouLette that redirects to a random web site -- as many as 30 requests a second to a PHP script that made a MySQL database connection. I'm guessing the motive was to acquire web addresses for e-mail harvesting or some other form of net ... (read more)

2005/04/06

Podcast Support in Weblog Pinger

I have updated Weblog-Pinger, a weblog update notification class library for PHP, to support podcasting. When a new weblog entry contains an audio enclosure, you can ping Audio.Weblogs.Com, which in turn notifies a lot of services that monitor the site, such as the podcast directory GigaDial. One gotcha for anyone else working on Audio.Weblogs.Com notification: the site's XML-RPC server is at audiorpc.weblogs.com, not audio.weblogs.com, which I finally discovered when I read the documentation. ... (read more)

2005/01/30

Weblog Update Notification in PHP

With help from Dave Sifry of Technorati, I have released Weblog_Pinger, a weblog notification class library for PHP that sends update pings over XML-RPC to services such as Weblogs.Com, Blo.gs, Ping-o-Matic and Technorati. The code has been released as open source under the GNU General Public License. Dave's going to be writing about this code on the Technorati Developers Wiki, which has an extensive section devoted to how to ping the site with weblogging software. ... (read more)

2005/01/10

Thinking Outside the Box

Although I have been touting the new autoboxing and unboxing feature in Java 2 version 5, I didn't realize how far the language is willing to go with these automatic conversions. The following code doesn't work in version 4: public void setDeposit(Float deposit) {   if (deposit >= 0) {     this.deposit = deposit;   } } You can't use a comparison operator like ">" to compare a Float object and a float value -- an "incompatible types" error indicates ... (read more)

2004/12/31

Addressing a PHP Name Resolution Glitch

My PHP error logs have been filling up with an ominous error message: PHP Warning: main(): php_network_getaddresses: getaddrinfo failed: Temporary failure in name resolution (is your IPV6 configuration correct? If this error happens all the time, try reconfiguring PHP using --disable-ipv6 option to configure) I don't know about the low-level cause for the problem, but I've figured out why it's happening so often on my server. I had the bad habit of using URLs in include statements for local ... (read more)

2004/12/28

I Want to Be a Better Neuron

Looking at Technorati this morning, I realized that none of the entries on my hand-coded weblogs are showing up there, presumably because I haven't been sending update pings to weblog notification services like Weblogs.Com, Blo.gs, and Ping-o-Matic. For a weblog to be a properly firing neuron in the information-gathering nervous system that Jon Udell describes on InfoWorld, tools like Technorati must learn in real time what's being linked, and by whom. To fix this, I'm writing a PHP class ... (read more)

2004/12/22

Closing Movable Type Comments

I'm winning the war on comment spam on Wordzilla, my homebrew weblog software, thanks to PHP code that rejects link-heavy comments and submissions from banned IP addresses. I'm losing on Movable Type and Manila. Both programs are being flooded with spam that has to be hand-deleted, a chore that's miserably time consuming in each. Six Apart enhanced Movable Type's comment-management features in version 3.1, but it can take up to five minutes to delete a group of spam comments on the Drudge ... (read more)

2004/11/30

Canning Comment Spam

Workbench has been under attack lately by a comment spammer linking to dozens of cheesy .info domains. The sites sell drugs like Cialis and Phentermine, offer Texas Holdem poker, and pimp a bunch of other get-rich-click schemes. I'm writing my own software here in PHP and MySQL, so I'm trying to deal with this abuse as painlessly as possible. For several hours at a time, a new comment spam is being posted every 1-2 minutes on the 2,300 weblog entries on this site. In a comment management tool, ... (read more)

2004/11/08

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