Want to read about EVOO over EVDO? Check out the latest blog in our growing family: Slashfood. Mmm mmm, good.
Brian Alvey
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Take me to your eater
Want to read about EVOO over EVDO? Check out the latest blog in our growing family: Slashfood.
Mmm mmm, good.
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Hack A Day hacked?
To quote Jason, "Yes, we got hacked." To quote Jay Allen, "It was a simple defacing."
Our oldest web server's FTP ports were not locked down in our firewalls. Not good. Someone ran cracking software, gained FTP access and defaced our sites. All of our other servers which run Engadget, Joystiq, TV Squad and any blog we've launched since January were untouched, but Hack A Day, Autoblog, Luxist, Gadling, Blogging Baby and several others were affected.
Not much left to say besides we got the holes on that old server closed and I can't wait to migrate everything off of it and decommission it. The new platform has no FTP. All files are managed via web form-based uploads. It's not the easiest way to get a large group of files to the server, but it isn't a hack waiting to happen like IIS's FTP server can be.
Any suggestions on web-based bulk upload tools or SFTP servers and clients? I'd love to hear them.
Now going offline again to continue celebrating seven happy years of marriage...
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We fired the pPlayer team
The day before the biggest poker event of the year, we let all of our pPlayer bloggers go. Then we re-hired all of them to work on Card Squad. The old pPlayer design was dark and heavy and although it was a nice seven-letter dot com domain name people either asked if "pee player" was our answer to Gawker Media's Fleshbot or they pronounced it "pee pee layer". Thrilling.
We launched pPlayer at the end of February and within a week we had decided to change the name to Card Squad. More than 500 posts later, we finally had the chance to get Mike to put together a new design and pulled the trigger on a full site conversion. It was pretty smooth. Go check out Card Squad.
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Bewitched: bothered and bewildered
Niki took herself to see Bewitched while Jack napped today. She said it started out promising, but then it went quickly downhill. She didn't even feel like it was worth explaining. Too bad.
We saw Batman Begins yesterday with Jack and it was great from beginning to end. When you have Michael Caine, Liam Neeson, Gary Oldman and Morgan Freeman as your supporting cast, it almost doesn't matter who you pick for Batman or the female lead. Katie Holmes was nice, but you got the feeling that her role could have been played by just about anyone. It was difficult to watch her and not think about Tom Cruise. The story relied heavily on Frank Miller's "Batman: Year One" and where they did throw in original plot points (like an incredible take on the Batmobile), they didn't screw anything up. Now let's hurry up and get that Fantastic Four movie released!
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Back from Live8
I'm back from Live8. What an amazing trip. My face is sun burnt and my legs are sore from all the walking we did. Niki and I zipped through our TiVoed 8 hours of Live8 and it was just about as bad as everyone said it was. We did catch a few frames of Walter and me in the crowd below one of the MTV commentators. The MTV coverage cannot even be compared to the AOL Music coverage online.
Highlights: meeting Don Cheadle, meeting more WIN bloggers and seeing Stevie Wonder live. And there are a couple of songs that I can't get out of my head.
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The city of bloggerly love
The rest of the week, I'll be in Philly -- blogging on Live8 Insider.
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All your tildes are belong to us
Over on Engadget Spanish, I noticed that our bloggers were letting their audience know that we're still in beta and we're working out some language-related kinks. Specifically, I'm making some changes to the platform so characters with accents don't get eaten in title fields. One quick fix I made for the Spanish team broke the form for the Chinese team. Fun stuff.One of our commenters thought that we were using some kind of automated translation software instead of humans -- primarily because of the missing accented characters. So I thought I'd ask Altavista's Babel Fish Translation to tell me what our Spanish blogger wrote::
Without tildes nor enies?
Before nothing, thousand excuses by that so horrible title. But indeed that is what we want to clarify... Why the titles of the new Engadget in Spanish do not have tíldes nor eñes? Then good, as they can see, this is the beta version of Engadget, so we are working hard to obtain a final version next. Our thousands of programmers (thousands, jeje) is adapting software so that it has supported other languages to the 100%, but that taking time. Other whatever still exist "bugs" in the system, and also many thousands translations that are not of manjares, but the equipment of Engadget in Spanish is working strongly so that our site is of the same quality that the original Engadget. We appreciated its commentaries and suggestions, so they do not let write to us. -
Put this one in daddy's scrapbook
Niki and Jack just got home from some childrens' event at the library. Jack walked to the top of the basement stairs and pointed at my computer (with his thumb, his pointing finger of choice these days) and said something that took me a few seconds to make out.
"Foo Fighters, Daddy."
Wow. Best Of You was playing on my laptop: "Is someone getting the best, the best, the best, the best of you?" Jack remembered that song from the video we saw weeks ago on MTV2's 24 Hours of Foo. The lyrics were easy enough for a two-and-a-half year-old kid to pick up and sing along with. When the song ended just now he asked for "Foo Fighters again."
This must be why people have kids. What a great day! -
Technology Review on WIN
Nice article in MIT's Technology Review magazine. It takes a look at the Weblogs, Inc. Network (WIN) as well as some of the Brian and Jason history leading up to it. The only facts that aren't 100% accurate are that we started recruiting bloggers in early 2004 (it was September or October) and that we created Silicon Alley Reporter together. It just seems like we did because we did CyberSurfer together before SAR, I was Jason's SAR art director twice and later I was his CTO for a few years.
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Reading between the lines
Lately people have been giving Jason a bunch of grief for our RSS feeds not having the same related "read" links at the ends of posts that we have on our blogs. Specifically, they suggest that there's something sinister behind this difference and ask how can we put Google ads in our feeds and at the same time not link to people we are getting stories from.
That's nuts. We have two publishing systems in use right now. The one that is nearly two years old still powers Engadget, Autoblog, Blogging Baby, Jason's blog and more than half of our blogs. The new one (Blogsmith) powers my blog, TUAW, TV Squad, AdJab, any other blog we have launched since January and some that we have had the time to migrate.
At some point in the last couple of months the code that showed the read links in the old system got overwritten. All of our new blogs have read links in the feeds. It's not a conspiracy. The fact that we weren't giving our audience a way to go visit the sites we cover was a mistake. What do we gain from writing a few lines about something cool and then failing to link to it?
So, the read links are now back in our older system. There's probably a sinister reason behind the restoration of these links, but I don't know what it is so I'll keep reading Jason's blog and I'll let you know if I find out why Jason restored the read links.
I also retired our 0.91 and 1.0 RSS feeds. In 2003, when I did an experimental blog contest site called Blogstakes, I figured those were three good flavors to support. When I did the publishing system for A List Apart, I used the same trio of feed versions.
These days it doesn't really make sense to keep all of those going. If anything we'll have RSS 2.0 plus Atom, but that won't happen any time soon. All of the requests for 0.91 and 1.0 feeds will be permanently redirected to our 2.0 feeds.
Our new system has never even offered anything below 2.0, so those feeds would be retiring when we migrated the remaining blogs to Blogsmith anyway.
While I was in there I changed the MIME type to application/xml instead of application/rss+xml since we aren't using a .rss extension and it was confusing Firefox.
GrimJack
EZ Street
Jon Sable, Freelance