New Comment Pages Added to Workbench
I spent a little time this morning improving the comment system on Workbench. There's now a comments page that shows the 50 most recent comments submitted to the weblog. After you submit a comment here, the site will store your name and home page link in cookies for 180 days so you don't have to type them in again. I've also added a line to the site's moderation policy: "Comments that have nothing to do with the subject of a post will be deleted." There's too much off-topic noise here. I'm not interested in ... read more
Adding ReCaptcha to a Weblog
I've added a ReCaptcha component to the comment form on Workbench to deter spammers. The ReCaptcha system presents two hard-to-read words that must be typed in successfully for a comment to be saved. Here's what the component looks like: I tried as long as possible to avoid using captchas, but the amount of spam hitting this blog continues to grow, particularly from foreign IP addresses. Workbench has received 16,000 comments and more than 260,000 spam since it began accepting comments in 2002. The ReCaptcha ... read more
SiteMeter Crashes Internet Explorer with 'Operation Aborted'
Last night several of my web sites, including the Drudge Retort, began crashing Internet Explorer with the error message "Internet Explorer cannot open the Internet site ... Operation aborted." I've encountered this error before, and when it occurs out of the blue on a site you haven't changed, the culprit is usually a problem with third-party Javascript code, as CNet's Clientside blog explains: IE does this when you attempt to modify a DOM element before it is closed. This means that if you try and append a ... read more
Displaying Twitter Updates on a Web Page
I recently began using Twitter, a microblogging service for posting short, chat-like blog entries and reading what other users of the service are doing. The site has severe reliability problems, but it's still an entertaining way to get real-time updates from bloggers I read along with others I know who've been sucked into Twitter's maw. I wrote some code to display my most recent Twitter update on my weblog, Workbench, in a sidebar at upper right. This afternoon, I've released the Twitter-RSS-to-HTML PHP script ... read more
Following Web Page Redirects with Java
CNET moved a bunch of its blogs to a different domain this weekend, including Beyond Binary, Coop's Corner, Geek Gestalt, One More Thing, Outside the Lines and The Social. I mention this because the change hosed Meme13, which treated all six as if they were newly discovered sites. One of my ground rules for developing Meme13 is that I won't hand-edit the site to make it smarter. I need the application to recognize when existing sites in its database have moved. Meme13 monitors sites using a Java application I ... read more
Setting the Link on a ShareThis Widget
I'm continuing to work on Meme13, a site that packages together the last 13 sites to show up on the Techmeme Leaderboard so they can be sampled as a feed or web site. The site has attracted around 25 RSS subscribers in its first month. I've added a ShareThis widget on each entry that makes it easy to share content from Meme13 on sites like De.licio.us, Digg and Facebook. Normally, ShareThis links to the page the widget has been displayed on. That doesn't suit my purposes on Meme13, because I'm trying to promote ... read more
How to Crash Your Apache Server with PHP
I returned from a trip out of town Monday to crashing web servers that ate my lunch all week long. For several days, I used the top command in Linux and watched helplessly as two servers ground to a halt with load averages higher than 100. Top reports the processes that are taking up the most CPU, memory and time. On the server running Workbench, the culprit was always httpd, the Apache web server. This didn't make sense, because Apache serves web pages, images, and other files with incredible efficiency. You ... read more
