Archive for the ‘General’ Category

Mar 09 2007 at 9:39pm

Full or Partial RSS Feeds?

I am considering using a wordpress plugin that would help me track my feeds. This plugin only offers full text RSS feeds. I’ve been a little wary of full text because I’ve heard about problems with people scraping content. There is a further discussion of this problem here and here.

I’m not quite sure what I want to do about this. I know I do want to do something different with the feed. It’s pretty crappy right now - all it has is a broken-off piece of the first paragraph and a bare url link to the post. Not so nice.

What do you think? Would you like it if I had a full text feed instead? I can’t imagine there are more than 3 people subscribed to my feed (pathetic, isn’t it?) , but I still want to make you happy :) It sounds like most people on other sites prefer full feeds. I tend to prefer partial sometimes, just because I like going to the site and I tend not to when there’s a full feed. On the other hand, there is a lot of content I would probably never read if the authors didn’t offer a full text feed.

I am starting to come around to offering a full text feed istead of partial. What I need now is more people reading (and linking to!) my content, not any side benefits that might come from visitng the actual site. I don’t have any advertsing here anyway so I’m not bothered about that.

By the way, if you know of any other good RSS plugins for Wordpress please let me know.

Posted in General | 3 Comments »

Mar 04 2007 at 3:42pm

Announcing A Padded Cell: the new content site from The Webmaster Forums

It’s ready! We’ve finally got the site in good enough shape for public viewing. I meant to post about this a week ago but so many things have come up that I wasn’t able to finish the post! So here it is:

A Padded Cell

PHP Month of Bugs: What does it mean for the rest of us?

Stefan Esser, founder of both the PHP Security Response Team and Hardened-PHP Project, has announced that he’s going to release over 31 bugs into the public domain during the month of March. He has started posting them, with three bugs already released on the site dedicated to the project. There has been some buzz in php-land about this, but I haven’t heard much outside of that.

So what does it mean for the rest of us? Anything? Abhi says that there are more likely to be problems with poorly coded PHP applications or improper server configuration. However, I think it’s a good idea for those of us running PHP applications to at least know that this is happening. Make sure you run a backup and keep an eye out for any security upgrades over the next month or so

Abhi, one of our moderators on the forum, also has some interesting thoughts about the problems with PHP in general.

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Feb 26 2007 at 3:05am

Where are all the Women in Web Design?

Eric Meyer had a post last week about gender diversity in the Event Apart conference series. What he’s saying, basically, is that he doesn’t believe in recruiting female speakers just for the sake of gender diversity. They want to get the best people, and I totally agree with that. I certainly would not want to be part of any project or conference just because I’m a minority.

Midway through the article Eric asks: ”So is the gender imbalance in the eye of the organizers, or is it in the very fabric of the industry?”

I’m Getting a New Laptop!

We just ordered it last night from The Linux Store. We were very happy to find a place that does Linux laptops in Canada. Otherwise I would have had to order from the US and pay customs fees which is a pain.

I’m getting a 15″ Lenovo 3000 N100 with a 1.6Ghz processor and 1gig ram. Ubuntu pre-installed. Liam has the email with the rest of the specs. It should be here in a few days!! Yay!

The computer I was using at home is 5 years old and I was really starting to get annoyed with it.

Posted in General | 3 Comments »

Feb 18 2007 at 3:19pm