Publishing

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

Matt Drudge: The Hits Keep on Coming

The New York Observer covers the upcoming launch of the Huffington Report and the need for liberal competition to the Drudge Report. Reporter Joe Hagan has overlooked the fact that there already are several wanna-be Drudges on the left, including BuzzFlash, Raw Story, and my own Drudge Retort, which I copublish with television writer Jonathan Bourne. Judging by our traffic, most of the world is overlooking us too, though Raw Story is growing fast. According to the Observer, for fun Matt Drudge ... (read more)

2005/04/06

All the News That's Fit to Hide

How to make the least amount of money possible with newspaper archives: Follow the example of Canada's Sun Media Corporation. Check out this old article from the Toronto Sun, one of 20,000 archived articles from Sun newspapers that have been crawled by Google. Nestled inside an ungodly mess of navigation links, ads, and other boilerplate, the 37K page contains less than 100 words of unique content that might attract a web searcher: Digging into the boys in the band DOC DIG! FOLLOWS THE EXPLOITS ... (read more)

2005/04/04

In response to the FeedBurner URL discussion, cofounder Dick Costolo writes that the service will be offering a way for users to redirect feed URLs if they decide to quit: I believe you will see in the near term that we are going to address all of your concerns and issues in a straightforward and meaningful way. I think the key point Eric made that I'd like to back up is that we believe that a publisher's ability to redirect off of FeedBurner is actually a benefit to FeedBurner. ... (read more)

2005/04/03

WordPress Takes a Negative Position

WordPress lead developer Matt Mullenweg has been quietly trading on the site's high Google PageRank, hosting more than 150,000 junk articles created solely to draw ad clicks on high-dollar keywords like asbestos and debt consolidation. WordPress.org hides links to the junk pages using a negative positioning trick in CSS: <div style="text-indent: -9000px; overflow: hidden;"> <p>Sponsored <a href="/articles/articles.xml">Articles</a> on <a ... (read more)

2005/03/31

Florida attorney Matt Conigliaro has done an unbelievable job of reporting on the state legal issues of the Terry Schiavo case. Beginning in August 2003, a month after he began his weblog, Conigliaro has covered the subject extensively, providing a reference page that manages to be both thorough and fair, though some people would consider his respect for the legal process as an attempt to pick sides: The facts of this case are terribly sad, but they are not hard to understand. There's really ... (read more)

2005/03/28

FeedBurner Users: Playing With Fire

I read this morning that Andrew Sullivan has added syndicated feeds to his weblog using FeedBurner. No offense to the FeedBurner developers, but every time I see this, I marvel that another weblogger has handed over their most loyal readers to a third party. FeedBurner offers several features for feed providers, but only one seems genuinely useful: better feed-reading statistics. The others -- multiple feed format support, podcasting enclosures, Creative Commons licensing -- are easy to get ... (read more)

2005/03/26

Permission to Speak Freely on RSS

After a few webloggers objected to his practice of reproducing their entries in full on his link site, Robert Scoble tied himself into an interesting knot, claiming that RSS is a format that only exists for software to reuse and remix, thus justifying his actions: RSS is a community syndication system. If you don't like your content being reused in weird, dangerous, wacky ways DO NOT PUT YOUR CONTENT INTO RSS!!! Hint: RSS isn't for humans. It's for syndication and resyndication systems to use. ... (read more)

2005/03/24

A visitor to the Drudge Retort remembers Andre Norton, the science fiction author who died Thursday at age 93: I was an indifferent and sullen youth, prone to acting out at school occasionally, and as a result, was sent to the library as a kind of holding cell/punishment. One day, bored out of my mind, I reached back and grabbed the first book that my hand fell upon and started reading. It was Ms. Norton's Witch World. My love of reading started with that book, which led me to Bradbury, ... (read more)

2005/03/21

Tina Brown compared bloggers to the East German secret police in Sunday's Washington Post: We are in the Eggshell Era, in which everyone has to tiptoe around because there's a world of busybodies out there who are being paid to catch you out -- and a public that is slowly being trained to accept a culture of finks. We're always under surveillance; cameras watch us wherever we go; paparazzi make small fortunes snapping glamour goddesses picking their noses; everything is on tape, with ... (read more)

2005/03/21

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