Technorati Tag API is Broken
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This is a bit disturbing:  "If your blog software does not support those things, don't worry, you can still play. To add your post to a Technorati Tag page, all you have to do is "tag" your post by including a special link. Like so:"  {{{ tagname }}}  There are a number of things wrong with this proposal:  1. They're encouraging people to always include the technorati.com URL within their specification.  While this is great for *Technorati* (and I love those guys and wish them all the best) its just going to increase their pagerank and act as free advertising.  If Microsoft were doing this would we really put up with it?  I don't th ...
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Jan Lehnardt points out an update that's been made to the CouchDb PHP library for the JSON API. As posted to the mailing list for the project:   Dear Couch Potatoes (or something), I updated the CouchDb PHP Library and the Demo application BugShrink (our bug-tracker) to the new JSON API.   You can try out this new update via the project's repository or just check out the CouchDb project homepage for more information.
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Latest PHPClasses.org Releases:Auto-Gen CSS FormsadebugFox captchasecShieldImage ResizerPage Rating Classl10nFuerte Image ToolOsiris CoreOsiris CoreArZipStrOTP_TSArZipStrDBNavigatorWAP PushphpTubegCachePaging Class with AJAX or HREF
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Cominciano a diffondersi le nuove versioni del worm Santy, che non dÃ  nessun problema ai navigatori, ma che puÃ² mettere ko i siti Web. Dopo che Google ha messo un filtro per impedire che il worm potesse
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Google will be coming out with a new meta tag for webmasters which identifies pages that have a time restriction or are time sensitive. The &#8216;unavailable_after&#8217; meta tag will soon be recognized by Google according to Dan Crow, Director of Crawl Systems at Google and Jill Whalen of High Rankings. Google is coming out with a new [...]
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MicroNova YUZU is a BSD-licensed JSP tag library designed to augment JSTL (JSP Standard Tag Library) using EL (Expression Language).     YUZU is compatible with both JSP 1.2 and JSP 2.0 specifications (tomcat 4.x/5.x).  JSTL/tagfiles along with YUZU transforms JSP into a powerful framework-independent XML-style "scripting language" for web applications and DSL (domain specific languages).   Features include:    - stackable (nestable beyond tagfile boundaries) tags - nestable/encodable map with XML/JSON support - "codec" functions (useable as JSP 2.0 EL functions)  - structured parameters with support for file-upload/select/radio  - "subroutine" call passing/returning non-string Object  - embedded EL pattern evaluation for regular text and SQL query  - HTTP client and response control  - HTML-to-DOM parser  - multipart email and mailbox  - dynamic method invocation, iterator, map, resource message map    Tags included in YUZU package are:    set, out, map, eval, param, call, return, value, include, log, postData, throw, synchronized, query, update, transaction, response, system, filter, parseHtml, mail, mailFolder   All YUZU tags follow a simple common behavioral pattern (prepare/import/default/process/assign/export) for ease of learning and extension.    CHANGES (20080211)  - added System:serialize and System:deserialize codecs - added Type:ifContained codec - added File:close and File:flush codecs - made System:uniqueId named - added System:resetUniqueId codec - made JSON:encode sorted
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Matthew Turland has mentioned his article in the latest issue of php|architect magazine (the December 2007 issue) covering web scraping.   Just a quick post to announce (albeit a little late) that the December 2007 issue of php|architect, which includes my article on web scraping. Please buy a copy, give it a read, and feel free to post comments on the forum thread for the article. I'd love to hear some reader feedback!   Other articles in the issue include "Writing an Object/Relational Mapper in PHP", "Understanding CLI" and the cover story "Going native with mysqlnd".
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Richard Thomas has decided to change the name of his project from the generic "Pjq" to something a bit more distinctive - jQPie.   I have expanded on this further, found a tastier name and now have a project page up http://projects.cyberlot.net/trac/jqpie/wiki. Added an cheesy jQuery/Interface autocomplete example although I would of preferred a json approach to the xml but it works never the less.   The jQPie project provides a way to link Javascript and PHP easily through the jQuery library with simple requests to use things JSON statements and direct output in your Javascript application.
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Proseguono senza sosta i problemi per il browser di Microsoft Internet Explorer. Una nuova segnalazione, definita estremamente critica, giunge dalla Secunia che ha riscontrato una problema di vulnerabilitÃ  relativo al tag IFRAME.
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Ben Ramsey has posted a (quick) new items over on his blog that looks at solving two problems he was having with his blog - the now non-functional Flickr feed and a sorting problem with array_multisort.   I recently upgraded a few things around here (in particular, an upgrade to PHP 5.2), and I noticed two issues that occurred after the upgrade. [...] I easily solved both of these issues.   The correction to the Flickr feed involved changing the namespace information for his request (adding a trailing slash) because the SimpleXML functionality got a bit more particular about the format.   The problem with array_multisort involved adding in a parameter that was implied in previous PHP versions, SORT_STRING, to get his code correctly working.
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The International PHP Magazine has posted the results of this past week's visitor poll asking "Which Feature Is Not Suitable for phpDocumentor?"   Of the choices, the "None" option got the most votes (33.3% in fact) followed at a large margin by "Fully customizable output with Smarty-based templates" and "Generates a todo list from @todo tags in source". The users have spoken and they think phpDocumentor is flexible enough to handle everything from outputting in HTML/PDF formats to having a web and command-line interface.   This week's poll question asks about something a little more common - which of the items in the list are your favorite PHP game (and yes, there's "All" and "None" options). Check it out and cast your vote today!
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Travis Swicegood has made a new release of the successor to the PEAR RunTest package for PEAR2 - the new PHPT.    Since this is usable and PEAR2 is still being worked out, I've decided to release this as a standalone package for the time being with the intent of bundling it with Pyrus or including it directly in PEAR2 when PEAR2 is realized.   This provides the majority of the functionality provided by PEAR's pear run-tests command via its own phpt command and it can even provide pear style output.    Examples of its use are included as well as the method to download this latest version (via a PEAR channel, of course) or through the package's web page. Issues found with the software can be posted to the project's Google code page.
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When Richard Jalichandra became Technorati&#39;s CEO in October, the company, a blogging and Web 2.0 pioneer, had generated enough drama in recent years to rival a soap opera.Founded in 2002 and led by its charismatic founder and CEO David Sifry, Technorati was a central player in the dizzying rise of blogs, serving as bloggers&#39; preferred search engine and embracing the spirit and technology of the Web 2.0 renaissance.But by 2005, many of its most ardent fans had become regular and increasingly disenchanted critics, questioning everything from Technorati&#39;s ability to index and rank blogs properly to its business partnerships and decisions.Last year saw much management upheaval, as Sifry, Vice President of Engineering Adam Hertz, Chief Technologist Tantek Celik, and others left their posts, opening the door to new arrivals, including Jalichandra, who has broad experience with Internet startups and online media. (Sifry remains Technorati&#39;s board chairman.)IDG News Service talked to Jalichandra last week about Technorati&#39;s future and its biggest challenges and opportunities. The following is an edited transcript of the interview, conducted at the Social Networking Conference in Miami Beach, where Jalichandra gave a speech.IDGNS: Is calling Technorati a blog search engine too narrow a definition of what the company does?Jalichandra: Our heritage has been, is and will always be in blog search. We&#39;re one of only two real-time search indexes covering the blogosphere: us and Google. That said, one of the things we found people are doing on our site is trying to discover things that are going on in the blogosphere or follow conversations. So we recently added a discovery layer [called Percolator] on top of the search infrastructure so people can have more of a reading/browsing experience in addition to searching. Percolator&#39;s intention is to find out what&#39;s gaining attention either in blogs or mainstream media.IDGNS: The boundaries between blogs and conventional Web sites have blurred significantly in recent years. How do you tackle that challenge if your mission is to index blogs specifically?Jalichandra: Yes, there&#39;s a huge blur that&#39;s occurring. Mainstream media gets it now, and they realize that they can create a lot more content with participation from the community. Today, a lot of mainstream media articles are written on a blogging platform as opposed to a [traditional] content management system, and it&#39;s an interesting challenge.IDGNS: Has Technorati then become a much broader and more encompassing search engine?Jalichandra: That&#39;s absolutely true. Our audience has more than doubled in size in the last year, and so has the amount of data in our index. We&#39;re definitely collecting and serving a lot more information than we have in the past.[According to comScore, Technorati&#39;s traffic grew from 948,000 unique visitors in December 2006 to 2.8 million in December 2007. By comparison, Google&#39;s Blog Search declined from 398,000 unique visitors to 359,000 in that period, although Google also serves up blog results in other of its engines, like News, Images and general Web search. Meanwhile, Technorati says it currently tracks 112.8 million blogs and more than 250 million &quot;pieces of tagged social media.&quot;]IDGNS: Are the executive changes at Technorati now finished?Jalichandra: In the evolution of any company, and particularly startups, you have different skill sets for different stages. Our founder [David Sifry] is an amazing technologist, product evangelist and visionary, and he realized about a year ago that the business was getting big enough and that he needed professional media expertise, because at the end of the day the ultimate business model will be based around online advertising -- and he didn&#39;t have that background. Then, subsequently, we had some more people join the company with that kind of media expertise and, if anything, we&#39;re going to be throwing gasoline on the fire and adding a lot of people both on the technology side and the media and business sides.IDGNS: Will Technorati seek more funding?Jalichandra: There are some things we want to do to expand for which we might seek additional funds, but the great thing about where the business is today is we&#39;re sitting on a very large audience that allows us to monetize, so we&#39;re starting to see fairly significant increases in revenue, so that will also help fund some of the growth and expansion.IDGNS: Technorati remains independent and privately held. Will it be sold to a larger company?Jalichandra: My plan is always to build a great business, and those things usually take care of themselves when you build a great business. That&#39;s been my experience and what I intend to do now. You build a great company and either you&#39;re a great independent or somebody else finds a nice fit for you.IDGNS: What are some key goals for Technorati in the coming year?Jalichandra: The high-level objectives are to continue to provide a great user experience, and that&#39;s both search and discovery. On the business side, the objectives are simply stated: to build a monetization infrastructure to grow the business from the revenue side.IDGNS: You carry Google ads. Do you sell your own ads as well?Jalichandra: We do have our own sales force, and they&#39;re doing fantastically well. We recently hired a new VP of sales and a new VP of business development, and they&#39;re really working on building up that revenue machinery.IDGNS: What is your international presence?Jalichandra: We have a joint venture with Technorati Japan, and that&#39;s the only dedicated country-specific site. But in the blogosphere, language doesn&#39;t have a lot of barriers. We&#39;ve counted close to 30 languages that appear regularly in the index. So while we don&#39;t have a very big international focus, by the sheer nature of the blogosphere we&#39;re an international company.IDGNS: Any plans to expand your international presence?Jalichandra: Absolutely. The blogosphere knows no borders so eventually we&#39;ll get there, but we&#39;re still a 30-person startup.IDGNS: A lot of the content in social networks is trapped in those sites. Does Technorati feel it is getting locked out of indexing the content on those very popular sites?Jalichandra: It&#39;s not a concern right now. There&#39;s enough people writing content specifically on blogs as opposed to their MySpace or Facebook page. Typically what you find with MySpace and Facebook is that there isn&#39;t a lot of serious blogging. People are just making one or two sentence proclamations and not writing [in-depth] about a subject matter.IDGNS: Do you have any plans to increase the social applications or features within Technorati?Jalichandra: People have Technorati profiles today, and registered users always check out who is linking to them, so that&#39;s one way that a lot of bloggers use Technorati today. In the future, we&#39;re looking certainly at anything we can do to improve the user experience or the community aspects of it.IDGNS: Do you consider social-news sites like Digg and Slashdot competitors?Jalichandra: What people do on Technorati is different from what they do on Digg. Digg is a more participatory news experience, whereas a lot of people that come to Technorati are looking to just follow a conversation happening on the blogosphere about a topic. I have a feeling that, like me, people use both Digg and Technorati for slightly different things.IDGNS: What can Technorati fans expect to see this year in terms of enhancements to the site?Jalichandra: In December we launched topical navigation categories, and because we have such an amazing amount of data we can create very granular topical areas, so I would look for an expansion of topics that end up with their own channels and sub-channels to highlight the conversations going on in those subject areas.From a blogger standpoint, we also launched Blogger Central in December, and we started putting a number of resources there to be a one-stop shop for bloggers to find out what the latest and greatest and the best way to grow your blog and all that, with Technorati and non-Technorati material.IDGNS: Do you feel you&#39;ve got the spam-blog problem under control at Technorati?Jalichandra: It&#39;s never fully under control because sploggers keep finding new, creative ways. It&#39;s not just us. Every search engine has been spammed to death. We feel we do a reasonably good job of it, considering how much spam there is in the blogosphere. It&#39;s a big part of what we do.
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I'm back, with a very interesting topic too!  Joel Spolsky, ex-Microsoft Manager and software engineering guru has a new essay, How Microsoft Lost the API War that is creating quite a big storm in the blogging communitiy.  Joel posits that the priests in the holy Temple of Microsoft have lost their way, because it has split into two factions, and the wrong faction is winning. One faction worships on the alter of backward compatibility, while the other is led by fervent priests who are proselytizing to raise up the new gods of .NET and Longhorn. Joel suggests that the new gods will cause the destruction of the holy Temple because Microsoft's great victories were built on the altar of keeping customers happy with backward compatibility. Furthermore the old gods of the Windows API continue to grow more grotesque and cruel with the passing of time, driving former worshipers into the arms of the friendlier gods of World Wide Web.  This story sounds extremely plausible. I must admit that i fit the profile of the developer who used to develop on the Window's API, is familiar with COM and Win32 who now develops mostly using PHP and Python. However I continue to develop and maintain Windows apps that keep our customers happy, and we still plan to develop new Windows apps. Some points:  Temple of the Blind? Firstly, Microsoft is still a compelling place to work for to people who feel that they can make a difference. The Temple continues to attract talented people with a Unix background. For example we have the recent hiring of Ward Cunningham, author of the Wiki.  Microsoft is still able to keep talented people like Raymond Chen, and others like him who continue to look after the Windows API, and Longhorn apparently will still give high priority to backward compatibility. Open sourcerers like Miguel Icaza are sufficiently attracted to the .NET vision to stake their careers on Mono. Longhorn and .NET are compelling technologies, so even if Win32 is not so cute anymore, M'soft is providing something that remains very attractive.  What i do see M'soft doing wrong is that they aren't disseminating the .NET runtime fast enough. It remains an optional install in XP Service Pack 2 for example. Also their IE dev team appears to be hog-tied due to political reasons; nevertheless IE remains good enough, particularly when I can embed IE as an activeX control, something I cannot do with Mozilla (AFAIK) - Update: I'm wrong.  Temple of the Spider?  Secondly, people don't merely use a web browser. They run the web browser in the OS.  So let me ask you, if you are using DreamWeaver or HomeSite or Photoshop or vi or emacs or Gimp, how many of you are willing to give it up for a java applet (or whatever your favorite technology is) running in your web-browser? Precisely.  Temple of the Abandoned?  Third, Joel makes the claim that developers are not developing to the Windows API. Well he could be right. But I bet a lot of them are still calling Win32.  If you are using a framework or IDE like Delphi or wxWindows (or .NET or VB) then you certainly are insulated from the Windows API, but that doesn't mean that you're not calling the Windows API all the time. I don't see Borland dropping their Windows version of Delphi at any point in time.   In fact, the fact that many developers are using some form of framework is a compelling argument for Microsoft to enhance the .NET framework to attract developers who are using other frameworks.  Today, not that many students learn x86 assembler, but that doesn't mean that Intel lost the CPU wars. Just because fewer people are learning Win32 doesn't mean Microsoft has lost the API wars, if the frameworks run predominantly on Win32.  Temple of the Lost  Joel even warns you in the beginning that "because I'm talking about big trends, I need to exaggerate and generalize". But you still get sucked in because Joel Spolsky is a first-class writer, in the same order as Philip Greenspun or Eric Raymond. That makes him so persuasive and plausible. But this is not Indiana Jones and doomed temples, but Steve Jobs and reality distortion fields.  Other opinions:  Harry Fuecks (PHP is ASP's upgrade path),  Dennis Hamilton (M'soft is just covering all bases), Robert McLaws (Joel is wrong in 7 points), Oliver Travers (the web is not good enough), One Run-time to Rule them all....
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Sebastian Bergmann has posted about a new contest to his blog today centering around the phpOpenTracker software.    After two years in which I did not have the time to work on it, the development of phpOpenTracker is slowly commencing again. The first step to restart the development has been the migration from BerliOS to a Trac setup that is generously provided by Tobias Schlitt.   While setting up Trac it occured to me that I do not have a logo for phpOpenTracker. To get to such a logo I try something new: I ask you to participate in the phpOpenTracker Logo Contest.    He sets up some rules for the competition including that the design should convey flexibility and that the winner's work will go under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 license. Check out the post, though, for the full details on rules and submission guidelines.
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According to this new post on the PHP Security Blog, there's a new META tag the Suhosin extension includes in the output of a phpinfo page to help resolve some of the issues with Google (and buddies) storing the contents of the page, giving a potential attacker information they could exploit.   [The] extra META TAG to the HTML output of phpinfo() that forbids indexing and archiving by robots. For fairness reasons following the embedded links is still allowed to robots, because a lot of projects [...] to get at least a few backlinks for their work, that might result in a better search engine positioning.   The patch can be downloaded from their site.
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After an annoyingly long series of beta releases, say hello to MediaWiki 1.3.0! Everyone running the beta releases is _strongly_ recommended to upgrade to the current code. MediaWiki is the collaborative editing software that runs Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, and other projects. It&apos;s designed to handle a large number of users and pages without imposing too rigid a structure or workflow.   This release includes a security fix: the 1.3.0 beta releases may be vulnerable to a PHP inclusion attack if include files are exposed and you have allow_url_fopen and register_globals on (this is the default configuration in PHP 4.1.x, but register_globals is off by default in 4.2.x and later).  Note that while MediaWiki through 1.1 required register_globals to be on, 1.2 and 1.3 *do not*. If you have register_globals on, you should turn it off unless you are absolutely sure you require it for some other package. See http://php.net/register_globals for general information.   Release notes: http://sf.net/project/shownotes.php?group_id=34373&release_id=259965  Download: http://prdownloads.sf.net/wikipedia/mediawiki-1.3.0.tar.gz?download  Wiki admin help mailing list: http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l  Bug report system: https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=34373&atid=411192  Play "stump the developers" live on IRC: #mediawiki on irc.freenode.net