This weekend I finally noticed that the Atom and RSS feeds from this site are 404. I’m not sure why exactly yet. It may have to do with the upgrade to WordPress 2.3.2 or it my be a result of the switch to shared hosting on pair.com. I’m out of town at the moment but I hope to fix it tomorrow.

elharo.com also seems to be completely down. I’m not sure why. I may just need to reboot the server when I get home. I haven’t yet transitioned that site to pair.com. Instead it’s still sitting on the Mac Mini in my office.

Update: I think I have the feed problem figured out now. Holler if anything still looks broken. It seems that the .htaccess file did not get uploaded when I uploaded the rest of the files from the old site. Hidden files are evil.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 14th, 2008 at 12:23 pm and is filed under Web Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the Atom feed. You can make a comment or trackback from your own site.

The following is a possible new chapter to be added to Refactoring HTML in the accessibility section. I’m throwing this in fairly late in the editing process, so I’d appreciate any thoughts, comments, or criticisms you might have about this. In particular, I’d appreciate any cases you can think of where autocomplete is not appropriate.

For what it’s worth, I’ve pretty well convinced myself that usernames and passwords are not such a case. That is, autocompleting usernames and passwords definitely increases accessibility and usually increases security. I don’t intend to explain why it improves security in this chapter, but if anyone wants to disagree with that, I’ll explain why in the comments.

Remove autocomplete=”off” attributes where appropriate.

<form action="/login" method="post" autocomplete="off">

<p><label>E-Mail Address: 
<input type="text" name="e1" autocomplete="off"/>
</label></p>

<p><label>Password: 
<input type="password" name="p1"  />
</label></p>

<input type="submit" title="Login" autocomplete="off"/>

</form>

<form action="/login" method="post" autocomplete="off">

<p><label>E-Mail Address: 
<input type="text" name="e1" />
</label></p>

<p><label>Password: 
<input type="password" name="p1"  />
</label></p>

<input type="submit" title="Register" />

</form>

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 25th, 2007 at 3:59 am and is filed under Refactoring HTML, Web Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the Atom feed. You can make a comment or trackback from your own site.

I’ve noticed a nasty trend in comment span here lately. So far it’s only a couple of posts, but it could become a flood. Comment spammers are copying sentences out of legitimate comments and resubmitting them with a link or two changed.

If you’re not careful, this can even fool a human inspection since the spam is thereby on topic and relevant. If it comes a couple of months after an original article was posted that received a lot of comments, it’s very easy to miss.

We may need to adjust comment filters to flag comments that copy content from previous comments. I’m not sure if any of the existing filters do that or not.

Even worse, now I’ve caught at least one apparently Polish spammer copying text out of other blog entries that reference this one and submitting that as comments here. The only hint that it’s spam comes from the site linked to. I don’t know if Bayesian analysis will catch these. Possibly a quick, automated Google plagiarism search might be in order?

This entry was posted on Monday, May 14th, 2007 at 12:26 pm and is filed under Web Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the Atom feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

WP_Cache seemed to work well for Mokka mit Schlag so now I’ve installed it here on The Cafes too. It dramatically speeds up performance by caching query responses while still allowing for live comments and editing and all that yummy fired goodness WordPress is famous for. We shall see. If anyone notes any problems on this site suddenly cropping up, please holler.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 3rd, 2007 at 12:18 pm and is filed under PHP, Web Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the Atom feed. You can make a comment or trackback from your own site.

I’ve written previously about anonymous blogging, and if that’s really what you want to do, by all means do it. However most of us are rather proud of what we write and aren’t trying to hide our identity. Nonetheless many bloggers effectively hide without realizing they’re doing it. If you do want people to know who you are, do yourself and your readers a favor: sign your posts.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 3rd, 2007 at 6:26 am and is filed under Web Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the Atom feed. You can make a comment or trackback from your own site.