Stupid wordpress still not supporting Atom 1.0. Stupid upgrade that overwrote my changes to make it support Atom 1.0. Yay for the cool plugin that will avoid this problem in the future. Also yay for the fact that it works out of the box with PHP 4 instead of using PHP 5 only functions for the date. Here's hoping it gets the time zones correct.
Category Archives: Rants
Yahoo Lists Are Painful
Whoever thought that supporting free mailing lists by putting ads in each email was ever going to be a good idea? My spam filter consistently picks up emails from Yahoo lists as spam and because the ads keep changing it never seems to learn that their not.
It probably doesn't help that Yahoo also includes a screenful of mailing list information at the end of each and every single post to the list.
Sigh.
Another Thing To Dislike About Obnoxious Referrer Links
I complained before about Obnoxious Referrer Links and now Andy has stumbled across problems they cause in the real world.
It turns out that having a meme tracker for the feeds you subscribe to can produce some interesting results. The big issue is that some feeds either rewrite URLs to include a redirect through their server, or strip all HTML and just give you a snippet of the article. This makes it basically impossible to determine if two items link to the same article.
I Thought Rails Was Meant To Be Productive…
Why is it that a hugely database dependent framework, that's meant to be extremely quick to get up and running with is so infuriating when it comes to get it actually talking to the database? I know cross-language interfaces are always difficult, particularly when you try to make them work cross platform but if I can get Java, PHP and perl all talking to MySQL easily, why does it have to be so damn hard for ruby?
Perhaps more importantly, why the heck do I need to? Developer time is meant to be sacred, so why isn't there a pure ruby embedded database that comes with rails? Why do I have to fight with the MySQL bindings before I can start developing, why do I have to configure where my database is and provide three separate configurations for testing, development and production? Why can't Rails just do it for me? Sure I probably don't want to develop my entire application on an embedded database and then hope it all works when I go live on something that can scale better, but at the same time, do I really need to go through configuration hell before I can do anything with Rails?
I think I'm really starting to appreciate the value of Apache Derby.
Obnoxious Referrer Links
There seems to be a trend these days that whenever you link to some external site, you do so via a redirect script on your own site so that you can track who's following the link and steal some google-juice in case anyone happens to blog about something you pointed them to. I'm not quite sure why, but I just find this obnoxious – maybe it's because I've been frustrated a couple of times when the referrer script was down, thus breaking the link – even though the actual site was up. Maybe it's because I resent the couple of extra seconds it takes to follow the link due to having to make two separate HTTP requests. Either way, is it really gaining you anything to put your users through this?
I find it most amusing that Planet HCI actually uses this technique – despite the fact that it makes for a lessened user experience. I just hope that Google is smart enough to pick up these fake links for the spam that they are and doesn't increase a site's page rank because of them.