MagpieRSS Caching Problem [en]

I have a caching problem using the PHP MagpieRSS library to parse feeds. Any help welcome.

[fr] J'ai un problème de cache utilisant la librarie PHP MagpieRSS. Toute aide bienvenue!

I’ve been stuck on a problem with MagpieRSS for weeks. This is a desperate call for help.

At the top of my sidebar, I have two lists of links which are generated by parsing RSS feeds: Delicious Linkball and Recently Playing. They don’t update.

If I delete the cache files, the script creates them all right. If I keep an eye on the cache files, I see their timestamp is updated every hour, but not the contents. I’ve uploaded the PHP code which parses the feeds.

Any suggestions welcome. I’m not far from giving up and setting cron jobs to regularly delete the cache files. Thanks in advance.

Update 13:00: The Recently Playing list updates once an hour (when the cache is “force-refreshed”), it seems — but not the Delicious Links one.

14:00: Some progress: http://del.icio.us/rss/steph/ doesn’t seem to update unless I clear the cache on my machine. (Huh?) http://ws.audioscrobbler.com/rdf/history/Steph-Tara, on the other hand, is — but why does the cache update only once an hour, and not each time the feed is modified?

15:00: crschmidt just pointed out that the last-modified date on my del.icio.us RSS feed was horribly wrong. Might be something that was done at the time when my caching problems were causing me to nastily abuse the poor del.icio.us server. I’ve sent a mail to Joshua to see if indeed this could be the problem.

15:50: Still thanks to the excellent crschmidt, I’ve finally understood how this caching is supposed to work. (Yes, I know, we’re starting to have lots of edits on this post.) There is a setting which determines how old the cache must be to become “stale”. As long as the cache is not stale, any requests made will use the cache directly, without pulling the feed in question. If the cache is stale, a request is sent to the server hosting the feed to check if it has changed since it was last accessed. If it has changed (i.e., if Last-Modified is more recent than the cache), it gets a fresh version of the feed. Otherwise, nothing happens (the cache age is just “reset”).

Now, for a LinkLog service like del.icio.us, setting the cache age to a couple of hours is more than enough as far as I’m concerned. However, for a list of recently played songs, every few minutes should be better. MagpieRSS seems to allow this to be set on a per-call basis by defining MAGPIE_CACHE_AGE, but it doesn’t seem to be working for me. Another variable is set on a per-installation basis: var $MAX_AGE = 1800; — but changing that won’t really help, as I want different values for Recently Playing and Delicious Links. Suggestions on this secondary problem welcome too!

16:40: After exchanging a few e-mails with Joshua, it seems that there was indeed a problem with the Last-Modified date on my feed. Not quite sure how it came about (somebody requesting the feed when I hadn’t posted in some time?), but it should be fixed now. I’ve cleared my cache files to see if my 30-minute “stale time” is working or not.

17:30: (See how I’m updating every 50 minutes? Freaky.) So, the not-so-nice things about PHP constants is that they are constant and (?) local to the function in which they are defined. (Not sure I go that bit right, but.) Important thing here is to note that MAGPIE_CACHE_AGE can’t be used to set different “stale cache” ages for different feeds. The stale cache age needs to be set at the bottom of rss_fetch.inc (the only place I hadn’t touched) — so my cache is now refreshing every half-hour. (Which is a bit too often for del.icio.us, and not often enough for Audioscrobblers.) oqp says he can write a wrapper to get around this limitation — I’m waiting impatiently for him to do it!

Missing Kitty [en]

My cat has been missing for a day, which is highly unusual. I’m letting off a bit of pressure by writing it down (and also, I am getting slightly bored of repeating the story on IRC). Oh, and don’t feed other people’s cats. Thank you.

[fr] Mon chat Bagha a disparu depuis hier après-midi. Je suis inquiète, je tourne en rond chez moi, donc j'écris. Cela m'évitera également d'avoir à  répéter tous les détails cent fois sur IRC. Ah oui, le message du jour, c'est: ne nourrissez pas les chats de autres. Merci. (Edit: il est rentré sain et sauf!)

Update 13.08 13:30: The cat just came home, safe and sound. I’m so relieved!

18:00: Bagha came back through the downstairs neighbour’s window, as usual. He messaged me, I ran there, picked up the cat and squeezed him (OK, not too hard, I know my cat basics). He ate a little, meowed, cuddled, and very soon wanted to go back out. Sign, in my opinion, of a cat who has been locked up rather than one who has been roaming around for two nights in a row. I feel like somebody has turned on the light after two days of fumbling around blindly in the dark.

The Story

Bagha has been missing now for over 24 hours.

He’s an outdoor cat. I let him out in the morning. He comes in and out as he wishes during the day. I bring him in for the night. He sleeps in the crook of my arm.

It usually takes me about 3 minutes to find him in the evening. If he’s not waiting for me in front of the building when I come home, I take my usual little trip around the neighbourhood and here he comes, running or trotting out of one of his favorite “places”.

Very rarely, I don’t find him straight away. I go out a couple of hours later, or he comes in on his own.

Even more rarely, I go to sleep without having found him. Let’s say that happened maybe ten times in the four years we’ve lived here. I then leave the door open with the chain (like during the day) so that he can slip into the flat. He takes advantage of other people going in and out to get into the

building. I wake up in the morning to find him curled up on my feet — or at the very worst, I find him waiting downstairs outside the door.

Not this morning.

I couldn’t find him last night. I’d been away all afternoon and part of the evening (nothing unusual). Between 8pm and 1am, I must have spent approximately 4 hours touring the extended neighbourhood, calling for him.

I checked the roads, of course. I always check the roads. I’m terrified one day I’ll find his dead body on the sidewalk. I know this fear comes from inside me much more than from the actual danger: it’s a slow road, Bagha has a healthy fear of vehicles, and he’s a pretty calm, laid-back cat who won’t be caught suddenly dashing into the middle of the road because something startled him.

Still, I check the roads.

This morning, I started touring the neighbourhood again. Further than the places I know he goes to.

Conclusion: he’s not outside, or I would have found him. (Well, he would have found me, that’s usually how it goes.)

So I toured again, calling outside garage doors, pausing and listening. He’s got a loud voice. I’ve heard him calling from the cellar or the flat on the fourth floor where he was locked in once. He knows how to make himself heard.

This, I tell you again, is the cat who usually comes running to me once he’s seen me.

He’s microchipped. This means that if somebody takes him to the vet or the shelter, he’ll be identified as mine and I’ll be contacted. If he gets killed by a car, he’ll be identified by the team who deal with animal remains, and I’ll be contacted. I checked all this with people involved. No, they hadn’t found my cat.

I spent the afternoon printing out leaflets to stick on the entrance doors of the neighbourhood buildings (I had already put one in mine before I left for lunch). Now there are 30 leaflets with contact details, photograph and description of the cat, as well as my suspicion that he is either injured or locked in somewhere, plastered all over the neighbourhood. As you are bound to ask, he’s neutered, so he’s not after some hot female kitty.

One phone call, from a man who said he’s just seen my cat. I went to see, knowing there could be a confusion — there are about 4-5 cats around here with similar markings to mine. I don’t think it was mine; first of all because it was outside, and I tell you, if Bagha was somewhere outside I would have found him; second because I went there, and called, and called again, and no cat appeared. But who knows. Maybe something really strange is going on here. I didn’t see the cat this man had spotted, so I can’t say for certain.

Now I’m back home, vaguely waiting for the phone to ring or the cat to walk in, trying to find something to do with myself. I feel like hell. I don’t know how I made it through the day. I miss my cat horribly, and I’m so worried that something bad might have happened. The thought I might not see Bagha again is just too hard to bear.

Is this the price to pay for love and attachment? Now I know why a part of me gave up on love so long ago. It hurts way too much. Yes, hard times and sad times are a part of life just like all the rest. But they shouldn’t have to be quite as horrible as moments like this one.

So while I’m at it, let’s be a little constructive. Do you ever feed “stray” cats? Think twice. Cats are always interested in food, specially if you give them nice juicy tuna when all they get at home is vet-recommended dry food. (By the way, don’t give too much fish to cats — it contains thiaminase, an enzyme which destroys the amino acid thyamin, which cats are incapable of synthesizing.) The “hungry stray” might very well be just a clever beggar from the next block. Bagha regularly gets fed all over the place, even though I spend my time asking people not to do so.

Feeding somebody else’s cat just lures it away from its home and owner, centre of territory and primary source of nourishment and cuddles. So please, don’t feed other people’s cat. For all you know, the cat may start making a daily trip across a busy road to come and sample the delicacies you have to offer.

Thinking of adopting the cat that wandered into your living-room one day and avidly lapped up the milk you gave it? Some very worried owner may well be looking for it. Make thorough enquiries in your neighbourhood before getting too involved with it (feeding, naming, buying a litter-tray). This may sound stupid, but while my upstairs neighbours were keeping Bagha during my first trip back to India, he was simultaneously being adopted by a nice couple living just the other side of the road. He still came back here to sleep, but he spent his days there, complete with name and tinned food.

So, to sum it up: cats are independant animals and like to look masterless. It doesn’t mean all of them are stray. Oh, and please don’t feed other people’s cats.

Now I feel a bit better. I’ll tour the garages and cellars again once it’s nice and silent during the night. Of course, I’ll let you know as soon as the kitty turns up again. Thanks for listening.

Musings on a Multiblog WordPress [en]

Thinking about a solution to make WordPress MultiBlog. Comments, criticism and other ideas welcome — please join the fun. In particular, I bump into a hairy PHP include problem.

[fr] Je réfléchis à comment on pourrait donner à WordPress la capacité de gérer plusieurs blogs avec une installation. Je me heurte à un problème concernant les includes PHP. Feedback et autres idées bienvenues!

Update June 2007: Try WordPress Multi-User now.

I’ve used Shelley’s instructions using soft links. I tried Rubén’s proof-of-concept, but got stuck somewhere in the middle.

So I started thinking: how can we go about making WordPress MultiBlog-capable? Here is a rough transcript of my thoughts (I’ve removed some of the dead ends and hesitations) in the hope that they might contribute to the general resolution of the problem. I have to point out my position here: somebody with a dedicated server who’s thinking of setting up a “WordPress weblog-farm” (for my pupils, mainly). So I’m aware that I’m not the “standard user” and that my solution is going to be impractical to many. But hey, let’s see where it leads, all the same. Actually, I think I probably reconstructed most of Rubén’s strategy here — but I’m not sure to what extent what I suggest differs from what he has done.

From a system point of view, we want to have a unique installation of WordPress, and duplication of only the files which are different from one blog to another (index.php, wp-config.php, wp-comments.php, wp-layout.css, to name a few obvious ones). The whole point being that when the isntall needs to be upgraded, it only has to be upgraded in one place. When a plugin is downloaded and installed, it only has to be done once for all weblogs — though it can of course be activated individually for each weblog.

From the point of view of the weblogs themselves, they need to appear to be in different domains/subdomains/folders/whatever. What I’m most interested in is different subdomains, so I’ll stick to that in my thinking. (Then somebody can come and tell me that my “solution” doesn’t work for subfolders, and here’s one that works for subfolders and subdomains, and we’ll all be happy, thankyouverymuch.) So, when I’m working with blog1.example.com all the addresses need to refer to that subdomain (blog1.example.com/wp-admin/, etc); ditto for blog2.example.com, blog3.example.com, blogn.example.com (I used to like maths in High School a lot).

As Rubén puts it, the problem with symbolic links (“soft links”) is called “soft link hell”: think of a great number of rubber bands stretched all over your server. Ugh. So let’s try to go in his direction, for a while. First, map all the subdomains to the same folder on the server. Let’s say blog1.example.com, blog2.example.com (etc.) all point to /home/bunny/www/wordpress/. Neat, huh? Not so. They will all use the same wp-config.php file, and hence all be the same weblog.

This is where Rubén’s idea comes in: include a file at the top of wp-config.php which:

  1. identifies which blog we are working with (in my case, by parsing $HTTP_HOST, for example — there might be a more elegant solution)
  2. “replaces” the files in the master installation directory by the files in a special “blog” directory, if they exist

The second point is the tricky one, of course. We’d probably have a subfolder per blog in wordpress/blogs: wordpress/blogs/blog1, wordpress/blogs/blog2, etc. The included file would match the subdomain string with the equivalent folder, check if the page it’s trying to retrieve exists in the folder, and if it does, include that one and stop processing the initial script after that. Another (maybe more elegant) option would be to do some Apache magic (I’m dreaming, no idea if it’s possible) to systematically check if a file is available in the subdirectory matching the subdomain before using the one in the master directory. Anybody know if this is feasible?

The problem I see is with includes. We have (at least) three types of include calls:

  • include (ABSPATH . 'wp-comments.php');
  • require ('./wp-blog-header.php');
  • require_once(dirname(__FILE__).'/' . '/wp-config.php');

As far as I see it, they’ll all break if the calling include is in /home/bunny/www/wordpress/blogs/blog1 and the file to be called is in /home/bunny/www/wordpress. What is wrong with relative includes? Oh, they would break too. Dammit.

We would need some intelligence to determine if the file to be included or called exists in the subdirectory or not, and magically adapt the include call to point to the “right” file. I suspect this could be done, but would require modifying all (at least, a lot of) the include/requires in WordPress.

Maybe another path to explore would be to create a table in the database to keep track of existing blogs, and of the files that need to be “overridden” for each blog. But again, I suspect that would mean recoding all the includes in WordPress.

Another problem would be .htaccess. Apache would be retrieving the same .htaccess for all subdomains, and that happens before PHP comes into play, if I’m not mistaken.

Any bright ideas to get us out of this fix? Alternate solutions? Comments? Things I missed or got wrong? The comments and trackbacks are yours. Thanks for your attention.

Weblogs à  l'école [fr]

Les weblogs à  l’école. Vous êtes parent, enseignant? Vous en connaissez des exemples? Partagez-les ici!

[en] A call to information and opinions on weblogging in schools. In particular, would you post photographs of the weblog owners on the blog, or their full name?

Cette année scolaire (ouille, le rentrée approche) va être pour moi l’occasion de travailler avec des élèves sur un projet de weblogs (un weblog par élève ou petit groupe, a priori).

Avez-vous fait une expérience semblable? Avez-vous des liens sur le sujet? Est-ce que votre école publie sur le web les photos des élèves qui y écrivent et leur nom? Qu’en pensez-vous?

Que vous soyez enseignants ou parents (ou même, autre!), votre avis sur la question m’interesse. Il y a Mario, il y a les élèves de St.-Joseph, il y a SchoolBlogs… mais encore?

Rencontre régulière de blogueurs romands [fr]

Je propose une rencontre romande de weblogueurs, tous les 1er mercredis du mois, à  Lausanne. Prochaine rencontre le 1er septembre, venez nombreux!

[en] I suggest a regular meet-up for bloggers in the French-speaking part of Switzerland (and others, if they are around), the first Wednesday of each month in Lausanne. Next meet-up on September 1st!

Bon, ça fait un moment que ça me démange, la dernière LBN a eu lieu il y a bien longtemps, et suite à  un petit sondage avec quelques autres blogueurs “romands ou habitant la romandie“, je me lance.

Sur le modèle de Paris Carnet ou des rencontres YULBlog, je propose qu’on se retrouve:

  • Le premier mercredivendredi de chaque mois, dès 19h (20h?)
  • A Café Romand à  la Place St-François à  Lausanne (c’est bien central — oui, on en a débattu hier soir, et les autres n’étaient pas lausannois!)

Ouvert à  tous, bien entendu, blogueurs résidants ou de passage, sans contraintes de régularité, etc. Faudra juste qu’on organise de vagues “pré-inscriptions” sur une page wiki ou dans les commentaires pour que je puisse réserver.

Reste à  trouver un nom. Jérôme nous a avoué ne s’être jamais senti vraiment concerné par les Lemanic Bloggers Night. J’ouvre donc ici un concours pour trouver un nom sympa, potable, explicite mais néanmoins rigolo pour ces rencontres. A celui ou celle dont on retiendra la proposition, on offrira gracieusement bières et croûtes au fromage (ou autre) lors de la prochaine rencontre (plus toute la gloire qui va avec).

La prochaine rencontre ne sera donc pas demain (ça fait un peu court!) mais le 1er3 septembre. Vous pouvez déjà  vous pré-inscrire dans les commentaires, en attendant qu’on se décide sur une page de wiki…

Indulging in Memes [en]

Another meme test. I don’t usually go for memes, but I love the idea of tests and research. The Google-juice is nice, of course, but I find almost more exciting to be able to visualise the trail of weblogs as the meme spreads.

[fr] Encore un meme. D'habitude, je ne saute pas dans le train, mais celui-ci a l'intéret (a) d'être créé afin d'en tirer quelque enseignement et (b) de nous permettre de visualiser immédiatement le "chemin de blogs" parcouru.

Update 04.08.04 23:50: post text modified as requested by Nova. (It’s pretty different from the initial text, but the idea remains the same. Not that I’m obsessed by Google ranking, as I hope you’ll guess.)

Copy This GoMeme From This Line to The End of this article, and paste into your blog. Then follow the instructions below to fill it out for your site.

Steal This Post!!!! This is a GoMeme– a new way to spread an idea along social networks. This is the second generation meme in our experiment in spreading ideas. To find out what a GoMeme is, and how this experiment works, or just to see how this GoMeme is growing and discuss it with others, visit the Root Posting and FAQ for this GoMeme at www.mindingtheplanet.net .

By adding this GoMeme to your Weblog you can get higher Google rankings for your site, and help your friends get higher Google rankings too. Your blog will be linked from every other blog that discovers this GoMeme downstream from your blog (from your readers, their readers, and so on). And that will raise your Google rankings in proportion to the number of downstream bloggers that get this GoMeme from you and post it to their blogs. The more people who blog the GoMeme from your blog, the better your Google rankings will get.

By hosting this meme on your blog, you will also be participating in an experiment to generate a distributed Blog survey and test how memes spread through social networks. The dataset from this experiment is public, open and decentralized — every blog that participates hosts their own data about their own blog. Anyone can then get the whole dataset by just searching Google for this unique string: 98818912959q This code is the “global unique identifier,” or GUID for this GoMeme — it marks every web page that participates in this GoMeme so that it can later be found with all the others. (Note it may take a week or longer before Google indexes your blog, so be patient).

Disclaimer

This is purely an experiment and is just for fun. We are really just curious to see what will happen and this is not a commercial project. Participation is voluntary. We don’t mean to annoy anyone. However, if you don’t have much curiosity, or at least a sense of humor, you may find this experiment to be upsetting. In that case, you might try drinking a good strong cup of coffee. If after that you are still unhappy with us, just don’t read any further and have a great day! (If you don’t want your blog to get better Google rankings, that’s purely your choice!) On the other hand, if you are interested in exploring new technologies and pushing the envelope, then keep reading and we look forward to your participation in this experiment. We also request that participants in this experiment refrain from spamming anyone with this GoMeme. To spread it, just put it on your blog; that should be enough.

INSTRUCTIONS FOR ADDING THIS GOMEME TO YOUR OWN SITE

Step 1 First, to add your site to this experiment, copy the GoMeme to your site from the “Copy This GoMeme From Here” heading above to the End of this article. Please copy this whole article and try not to alter the text so that it is authentic for the people who get it from your blog. If you would like to come up with your own catchy headline, or anything else to help your GoMeme spread, feel free! Let’s see what works best.

Step 2: Now, fill in your answers to these Required Survey Fields (Note: Replace the answers below with your own answers). These will later be automatically data-mined by bots to compile the survey results.

(1) I found this GoMeme at URL: http://www.mindingtheplanet.com

(2) I found this GoMeme on date (day/month/year):04/08/04

(3) I found this GoMeme at time (in GMT format): 07:30:00

(4) I foundit via “Newsreader Software” or “Browsing the Web” or “Searching the Web” or “An E-Mail Message”: Browsing the Web

(5) I posted this GoMeme at my URL (use a hyperlink): Climb to the Stars

(6) I posted this on date (day/month/year): 04/08/04

(7) I posted this at time (in GMT format): 07:50:00

(8) My posting location is (city, state, country): Lausanne, Vaud, Switzerland

Step 3: If you’re feeling very altruistic today, also fill in these optional survery fields (Replace the answers below with your own answers):

(9) My Weblog is hosted by: Myself

(10) My age is: 30

(11) My gender is: Female

(12) My occupation is: Teacher

(13) I use the following RSS/Atom reader software: NetNewsWire Lite

(14) I use the following software to post to my blog: WordPress

(15) I have been blogging since (day, month, year): 13/07/00

(16) My web browser is: FireFox

(17) My operating system is: OSX

Step 4:Now add an entry for your site after the last entry in the PATH LIST below: Your entry should be of the form: line number, URL, hyperlink, optional personal GUID for your blog.

(Note: If you would like to track all postings of the Meme that result from your posting of it, once Google has indexed them, you may add your own optional GUID after your hyperlink on your line of the Path List — just make sure it is short, unique, and doesn’t return any results on Google — for example “mysitename137a2r28”. Also note, if the path list gets too long, you should still try to include the whole path in your blog — even if you have to put the list on a continuation page rather than the excerpt for your posting — and make sure others copy the whole GoMeme along with your Path List when they get the GoMeme from you — If they don’t copy it, your blog and your upstream blogs won’t be linked from their blogs).

PATH LIST

1. http://www.mindingtheplanet.net Minding The Planet, mindingtheplanet14798
2. https://climbtothestars.org Climb to the Stars, climbtothestars87432
3. (your Path List entry goes here in the form URL, hyperlink, GUID. Also, please add a new line after this one, for the next person.)

The End

Weblog de Bernard Rappaz [fr]

Très bon billet de Bernard Rappaz de la Télévision Suisse Romande sur son (tout frais) weblog: le journaliste face au blog.

[en] Bernard Rappaz is a journalist at the Télévision Suisse Romande (Swiss French-speaking TV). His weblog opens on a very nice post about journalists and weblogging.

Mieux vaut tard que jamais, je viens de prendre la peine de lire l’excellente entrée en matière de Bernard Rappaz sur son weblog. J’aime quand “ça sent l’intelligence”!

En voilà  donc un qui vient de trouver sa place dans mon aggrégateur. Monsieur Rappaz, vous pouvez vous considérer comme lu 🙂

Testing Meme Propagation In Blogspace: Add Your Blog! [en]

Participating in a meme propagation experiment.

[fr] Ce billet fait partie d'une expérience sur la propagation des "memes" dans la blogosphère.

Update 10.08: you should try the latest version of this type of meme instead. It’s pretty neat as it keeps a “memory” of where it has been.

This posting is a community experiment that tests how a meme, represented by this blog posting, spreads across blogspace, physical space and time. It will help to show how ideas travel across blogs in space and time and how blogs are connected. It may also help to show which blogs are most influential in the propagation of memes. The dataset from this experiment will be public, and can be located via Google (or Technorati) by doing a search for the GUID for this meme (below).

The original posting for this experiment is located at: Minding the Planet (Permalink: http://novaspivack.typepad.com/nova_spivacks_weblog/2004/08/a_sonar_ping_of.html) — results and commentary will appear there in the future.

Please join the test by adding your blog (see instructions, below) and inviting your friends to participate — the more the better. The data from this test will be public and open; others may use it to visualize and study the connectedness of blogspace and the propagation of memes across blogs.

The GUID for this experiment is: as098398298250swg9e98929872525389t9987898tq98wteqtgaq62010920352598gawst (this GUID enables anyone to easily search Google (or Technorati) for all blogs that participate in this experiment). Anyone is free to analyze the data of this experiment. Please publicize your analysis of the data, and/or any comments by adding comments onto the original post (see URL above). (Note: it would be interesting to see a geographic map or a temporal animation, as well as a social network map of the propagation of this meme.)

INSTRUCTIONS

To add your blog to this experiment, copy this entire posting to your blog, and then answer the questions below, substituting your own information, below, where appropriate. Other than answering the questions below, please do not alter the information, layout or format of this post in order to preserve the integrity of the data in this experiment (this will make it easier for searchers and automated bots to find and analyze the results later).

REQUIRED FIELDS (Note: Replace the answers below with your own answers)

  • (1) I found this experiment at URL: http://mouche.joueb.com/news/559.shtml
  • (2) I found it via “Newsreader Software” or “Browsing the Web” or “Searching the Web” or “An E-Mail Message”: Newsreader Software
  • (3) I posted this experiment at URL: https://climbtothestars.org/
  • (4) I posted this on date (day, month, year): 03/08/04
  • (5) I posted this at time (24 hour time): 08:55:00
  • (6) My posting location is (city, state, country): Lausanne, Vaud, Switzerland

OPTIONAL SURVEY FIELDS (Replace the answers below with your own answers):

  • (7) My blog is hosted by: myself (dedicated server at ovh.net)
  • (8) My age is: 30
  • (9) My gender is: Female
  • (10) My occupation is: teaching
  • (11) I use the following RSS/Atom reader software: NetNewsWire Lite
  • (12) I use the following software to post to my blog: WordPress
  • (13) I have been blogging since (day, month, year): 13/07/00
  • (14) My web browser is: FireFox
  • (15) My operating system is: OSX

Alarm: Orcut, Evil Fake Orkut Clone? [en]

How I thought orCut.com might be a phishing operation to grab orKut.com usernames and passwords. A comment on Google’s irresponsibility in encouraging users to fall for phishing.

[fr] Comment j'ai cru que orCut.com était un faux site destiné à  ramasser des mots de passe orKut, et un commentaire sur l'irresponsabilité de Google, qui par de telles pratiques encourage les internautes à  tomber victimes du phishing.

Preliminary note: although nice blogging tools like WordPress have really sexy interfaces for you to type your posts in, resist the temptation. I won’t tell you more, except that Q and W are right next to each other on my keyboard, and that I’m about to write up this bl***y post for the second time.

So, I’m a bit of a referrer junkie. When I see something new, I usually click’n see. Today, I found this in my recent referrals. Now, since I nearly got phished, I’m a bit cautious, and I immediately noticed that it was orCut and not orKut in the URL, even though (particularly as) the pages on the two sites look exactly the same.

Do you smell a rat? I smelled a phish, and it seems I’m not alone. A quick expedition on google, however, tells us that many think orCut.com is legitimate. Scary! Think of what these people would do with all the juicy information they would get out of our Orkut logins and profiles! And hey, it’s not just orCut, there is orkAt too!

But wait. Everybody freeze! Look what Suw managed to dig out: a May 04 post from Evan William’s blog, telling us orkAt, orCut, and even orCIt are legitimate alternatives to orKut.com. Well, we’re most relieved to know this wasn’t all some evil scam — and Ev should know what he’s talking about, as he works from Google.

However, doesn’t it strike you as a trifle irresponsible on the part of Google to do something like this? I mean, doesn’t this make users more vulnerable to phishing? Next time they get a PayPal e-mail with a fake link in it, are their alarm bells going to ring, after their positive experience with the “alternative Orkut URLs”? Methinks they could at least have specified the alternate URLs somewhere on the home pages. A quick trip to orkut.com would have cleared any doubts of mine. ‘Coz now, who is to stop Orkit.com, or any other nice-sounding possible clone that phishers may come up with?

La Suisse, Tiers-Monde du joueb? [fr]

Encore un médiocre article sur les weblogs. Et je me permets de relever leur utilisation de “joueb” comme traduction de “blog”…

[en] A short comment on this article on blogs in Switzerland which clearly doesn't get it (Yet Another Lame Article on Weblogs).

Là , très franchement, je vais me fâcher tout rouge. Qu’on parle de “joueb” dans le cadre de Joueb.com, je veux bien, mais qu’on utilise ce mot comme traduction de l’anglais “blog” sans sourciller dans ce plutôt moyen article sur les weblog en Suisse, cela me donne à  penser que le traducteur, du moins, n’a pas trop mis les pieds dans la blogosphère romande.

Donc, chers lecteurs, sachez qu’il y a des weblogs en Suisse. Mis à  part ça, je ne vais pas m’amuser à  démonter l’article en question, tellement il me semble évident qu’il s’agit d’une reprise très standard du thème “ils ont pas compris les blogs” par quelqu’un qui, visiblement, n’a pas compris grand-chose non plus.

Prochain pas à  attendre: que ces «blogueurs» fabriquent eux-mêmes leurs nouvelles.

Comme me le fait remarquer Suw, la simple présence d’une phrase comme celle-ci, dans un article sur les weblogs, en dit bien long…