d00dism

I love when I get mentioned in other people’s blogs. In particular, when it’s a sexy context as at Dana’s blog.

The WordPress Development Blog has been updated with information about WordPress 1.3. It looks like they’ve been making some great strides and good improvements, but consipicuously absent from their goal list is per-post formatting support. This makes me very sad.

Some may have noticed the Blog Change Bot button I added to the sidebar some time ago. It was part of an experiment to see how well it worked. Until recently, it simply didn’t work at all. Sure, I could IM it at blogchangebot. I could even send commands. It even seemed to recognize my subscriptions and list their last modification.

The problem was that it never notified me of changes (and I’m online more often than not). I was just about to remove the button and link when, this morning I actually got an update notification from blogchangebot8. Recently, I noticed that the bot had gone down frequently and I’m guessing that the developer was having scalability issues (though you couldn’t tell this from the website).

At any rate, it’s now working. This is great news for you that want to monitor this site, or any other site that pings weblogs.com (which generally means they have an RSS feed as well). Simply IM blogchangebot and let it know. It will IM you when there are updates (again, I haven’t gotten reliable service out of it yet). You can stay up to date without needing an RSS reader (though I think they are preferable).

Brent Simmon’s, developer the excellent MarsEdit, has asked a very important question. Isn’t it time that a common weblog system feature set was agreed upon?

This is related to my earlier entry about the fact that WordPress doesn’t entire support Movable Type’s API. For the record, it is very close. This isn’t horseshoes and computers are far less forgiving than any person I know. By leaving something as “minor” as post specific text formatting, it becomes impossible for external editing software to determine how to format posts, particularly for preview purposes.

Efforts have been made to standardize weblog editing APIs (see the MetaWeblogAPI). Unfortunately, it’s not complete enough to satisfy most major weblog systems, whom to this end, have most adopted Movable Type’s API. It’s superset of the MetaWeblogAPI is certainly more complete, but it’s not quite as extensible as some would like, forcing abuse of certain attributes in order to achieve the desired effect.

Brent spoke not so much about the API, but the feature set supported by weblog systems. However, it is these feature sets that generally dictate the nature of the APIs. In fact, incomplete API implementation is usually the result of different feature sets. WordPress doesn’t implement mt.supportedTextFilters because it has no notion of post specific formatting. Movable Type lacks custom fields.

This was not previously a problem as most blog users were either uber geeks or were normal people that were content with rather limited options (LiveJournal is the prime example of this with its virtually otherwise inexplicable popularity). Now that every body and their brother has a blog and uses previously advanced features such as trackbacks and pings, it’s become center stage. When the web came to center stage, the same thing happened, with different browsers supporting different technologies. We eventually ended up with standards (which is wonderfully described by Jeffrey Zeldman in his book, Designing with Web Standards).

I think it’s time that the same was done for weblog systems. The question is though, who will step up and will the big players (Six Apart in particular) sign on for such an effort?

Phishing (which is explained at Wikipedia) has become very commonplace, particularly on the Internet. It even happens over the phone.

Up until this morning, I thought only morons became the victims of these scams because they were so obvious. However, this has changed somewhat. Not only has it become much more common (hell, more than half of my spam is phishing attempts), but they’ve hidden themselves very well.

My father received an email this morning from Amazon.com supposedly asking to verify his credit card information. Yesterday, he had placed an order for him. The email even had an “@amazon.com” return address. It contained a link that was of the structure: {http://www.amazon.com@service02.com//exec/obidos/subst/home/home.html/102-9382243-7140932}. Looks like Amazon, right? Wrong. Everything preceding the “@” is considered a username for the domain that follows, which is our scammer.

Well, after entering his credit card at a site that looks like a perfect replica of Amazon’s site, my father noticed that the number it spit back was wrong (these scumbags of the earth aren’t quite perfect yet). I took a look and immediately surmised that it was bogus. Canceling of the credit card followed.

Now, dad is older, but he’s not technologically inept or stupid. This message was timed really well and cleverly disguised. Luckily, Firefox will warn if a username precedes a domain name. Safari does not (hopefully they’ll take a page out of Firefox’s book). At any rate, be careful and read policy statements for your online retailers. If in doubt, ask someone.