Programming

Following Web Page Redirects with Java

CNET moved a bunch of its blogs to a different domain this weekend, including Beyond Binary, Coop's Corner, Geek Gestalt, One More Thing, Outside the Lines and The Social. I mention this because the change hosed Meme13, which treated all six as if they were newly discovered sites. One of my ground rules for developing Meme13 is that I won't hand-edit the site to make it smarter. I need the application to recognize when existing sites in its database have moved. Meme13 monitors sites using a ... (read more)

2008/05/25

Setting the Link on a ShareThis Widget

I'm continuing to work on Meme13, a site that packages together the last 13 sites to show up on the Techmeme Leaderboard so they can be sampled as a feed or web site. The site has attracted around 25 RSS subscribers in its first month. I've added a ShareThis widget on each entry that makes it easy to share content from Meme13 on sites like De.licio.us, Digg and Facebook. Normally, ShareThis links to the page the widget has been displayed on. That doesn't suit my purposes on Meme13, because I'm ... (read more)

2008/05/19

How to Crash Your Apache Server with PHP

I returned from a trip out of town Monday to crashing web servers that ate my lunch all week long. For several days, I used the top command in Linux and watched helplessly as two servers ground to a halt with load averages higher than 100. Top reports the processes that are taking up the most CPU, memory and time. On the server running Workbench, the culprit was always httpd, the Apache web server. This didn't make sense, because Apache serves web pages, images, and other files with incredible ... (read more)

2008/05/02

Twitter: Where Ruby on Rails Goes Off the Track

An article posted on eWeek today was written in an alternate universe where Twitter works: As the maker of one of the largest applications using Ruby on Rails on the Web, Twitter knows a thing or two about scaling applications built with the popular development framework. Britt Selvitelle, a senior engineer at Twitter, offered a few tips and tricks for scaling Ruby on Rails and expressed particular appreciation for the Rails framework itself and the language is it based on, Ruby. "For us, for a ... (read more)

2008/05/01

Meme13: Angering New Bloggers in Tech

Meme13 is getting knocked around a bit by people who think that it's just another scraper republishing RSS feeds, hurting the search-engine rank and traffic of the publishers who created the content. Two of those people are Tony Hung and Darren Rowse, bloggers currently featured on Meme13. Hung writes: ... Meme13 is simply pulling feeds and republishing them all. Like any good ol' scraper blog. ... More of the GD same -- and what's really funny (again, not in a ha ha way) is not even that ... (read more)

2008/04/17

Meme13: Finding New Bloggers in Tech

Steven Hodson writes: I get a real kick out of it when people start pontificating on why the tech blogosphere is becoming nothing more than [a] self-fulfilling chamber filled with the dull echos of me-too posting that attach themselves like leeches to the supposed brilliant writings of the blogosphere mucky mucks. Me too. Every six months or so, techbloggers reach the joint realization that we're all linking to the same people having the same thoughts about the same subjects. Somebody blames ... (read more)

2008/04/15

Loading Ad Javascript with PHP

I serve ads on the Drudge Retort using Blogads, a great ad broker that occasionally has trouble serving the ads. When this happens, pages on the Retort load more slowly because they can't fetch a Javascript program and CSS stylesheet required by Blogads. I decided to fix this problem by writing Cache Remote File, a PHP script that performs three functions: Save a cached copy of a remote file Display the cached copy for 10 minutes before requesting the file again Display the cached copy when the ... (read more)

2008/03/01

Hoosgot: The Return of the LazyWeb

Hoosgot a web application for creating a hierarchical Dmoz-style link directory in a browser? The term "hoosgot" is newly coined by Dave Sifry, a founder of Technorati and one of my former homies on the RSS Advisory Board. He's launched the web site Hoosgot (as in "who's got?") for lazy people who have technical requests for help. Just use the word "hoosgot" as a verb in a request on your blog (or @hoosgot on Twitter) and it'll end up on his site, where it's hoped someone more industrious can ... (read more)

2007/12/30

Weblog Pinger Extended with MySQL Database

I've added a MySQL database to Weblog-Pinger, my weblog update notification class library for PHP, so that it can track ping attempts and keep from hitting the same server too often. Some notification services reject pings sent too frequently. When I was the king of pings for six months in 2005, Weblogs.Com rejected pings sent more frequently than once per half-hour. If you try to ping Ping-O-Matic too often today, you get the error message "Pinging too fast. Slow down cowboy. Please ping no ... (read more)

2007/09/19

UDRP Response Filed to Save Wargames.Com

My attorney Wade Duchene has filed our response to the Uniform Domain-Name Dispute Resolution (UDRP) complaint made by MGM Studios over Wargames.Com. We're getting closer to the day where a panel of three arbitrators decides whether to give the domain to MGM, which owns a trademark registered in 2003 for the 1983 film WarGames. UDRP arbitration is an increasingly popular tool for intellectual property lawyers trying to acquire domains for clients, as MGM's firm is attempting here. If they lose, ... (read more)

2007/01/11

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