Customizing Apache Directory Listings with .htaccess
I was clearing off my desk today when I found an article I've been meaning to scan and send to somebody -- the story of how my friends almost elected a dalmatian and squirrel to the homecoming court of the University of North Texas in 1989. The alumni magazine wrote a feature on Hector the Eagle Dog and Agnes the Squirrel's campaign, which attracted national media and made a few of the human homecoming candidates very angry. I can never tell when a file's too big to send in email without aggravating the ... read more
Adding ReCaptcha to a Weblog
I've added a ReCaptcha component to the comment form on Workbench to deter spammers. The ReCaptcha system presents two hard-to-read words that must be typed in successfully for a comment to be saved. Here's what the component looks like: I tried as long as possible to avoid using captchas, but the amount of spam hitting this blog continues to grow, particularly from foreign IP addresses. Workbench has received 16,000 comments and more than 260,000 spam since it began accepting comments in 2002. The ReCaptcha ... read more
SiteMeter Crashes Internet Explorer with 'Operation Aborted'
Last night several of my web sites, including the Drudge Retort, began crashing Internet Explorer with the error message "Internet Explorer cannot open the Internet site ... Operation aborted." I've encountered this error before, and when it occurs out of the blue on a site you haven't changed, the culprit is usually a problem with third-party Javascript code, as CNet's Clientside blog explains: IE does this when you attempt to modify a DOM element before it is closed. This means that if you try and append a ... read more
Web Traffic Counts: Is Compete Any Good?
I occasionally cite web traffic stats from Alexa and Compete, two services that measure traffic across the entire web. It's probably worth pointing out that I have no idea at all whether they're accurate. Compete publishes a monthly count of site visitors based on data from two million U.S. Internet users, so I can compare its numbers directly to the stats I get from Google Analytics. Since the latter is based on actual traffic, it's a reliable metric. For the Drudge Retort, Google Analytics reports 337,985 U.S. ... read more
Eleven Years as the Dark Humor Man
Exactly 4,200 days ago, I began Cruel Site of the Day, a demented parody of Cool Site of the Day and other award sites. I had just left an interactive TV startup in Denver that went broke the day our product launched and was starting my own web development company in Pekin, Illinois, a town outside of Peoria where the air smells like corn, marigolds and hopelessness. As Wall Street was making overnight dot-com millionaires out of a bunch of insufferably precocious twentysomethings like Marc Andreesen, I was a ... read more
Liberal Site Raw Story Frames News Articles from Other Sites
The liberal news site Raw Story makes a regular practice of framing articles from other media sites, displaying the pages at a Raw Story web address with additional advertising. This technique was the subject of a widely publicized copyright and trademark infringement lawsuit in the late '90s between a small news site and several media giants. Some examples from Raw Story's current front page: British to evacuate consulate in Basra after mortar attacks, The Telegraph Zoo celebrating rare dove birth, BBC News ... read more
Creative Commons and the Eldred Decision
Lawrence Lessig quantifies how well Creative Commons is doing: Creative Commons launched the licensing project in December 2002. Within a year, there were more than 1,000,000 link-backs to our licenses (meaning at least a million places on the web where people were linking to our licenses, and presumptively licensing content under those licenses). Within two years, that number was 12,000,000. At the end of our last fundraising campaign, it had grown to about 45,000,000 link-backs to our licenses. That was ... read more
