Last night, Matt managed to get himself blocked from the MikeCam by an anti-spam plugin I’m using called “Bad Behavior” when he installed Google Desktop 2 and used it to try and add an RSS feed from my blog. As it turns out, Matt’s accidental banning was most fortunate, because it led to two fixes for Bad Behavior, possibly a fix for Google Desktop itself, and resulted in me beginning to use FeedBurner to distribute my RSS feeds.
To address each of those in order: The reason Matt got banned was that when Google Desktop 2 accesses an RSS feed, it sends its user agent as “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; Google Desktop)” but then does not send the required “Accept:” header that all Mozilla-compatible user agents send. As a result, Bad Behavior thought it might be a spambot pretending to be Mozilla and consequently banned Matt. Further, when I tried to whitelist Matt so that he could access the site regardless, it had absolutely no effect! I e-mailed Michael Hampton/io_error, the author of BB, and he responded this morning, confirming my suspicions regarding GD2’s RSS handling being the problem, and providing the explanation I just paraphrased here. This evening, he released an update fixing both of the bugs that Matt and I had discovered. Not only that, but when I mentioned it to someone in the Gallery IRC channel, Bharat, the founder of Gallery and a Google employee, asked me to e-mail him the info so he could look into the Google Desktop side of things! How cool is that? Matt’s little episode may very well result in a Google fix! The last little outcome of this episode is that, in the meantime, to avoid accidentally banning GD2 users, Michael Hampton had suggested I use FeedBurner, which I had glanced at before but never really had an interest in because I wasn’t doing anything with RSS. Now that I’m interested though, I realize that it’s a terrific free service that not only mirrors your feeds (saving you server load and data transfer), but can do about anything you could dream of to your feeds. Automatically make them compatible with the RSS reader the user is using? Yes! Statistics on your readership? Yup. Automatically add enclosures for podcasts or other media? Sure! It’s really great, and it’s really free, and I love the copy on their site – it conveys a fun, friendly attitude.
In related news:
- My patch to fix XHTML compliance in the great EventCalendar plugin was incorporated into the latest release today (well, it’s 12:30am, so really it was yesterday, but who’s counting?).
- Sent in a couple crash traces to Amarok today as well, since I use bleeding edge SVN code and after updating and recompiling today it started crashing out on me on playback. As of this evening it works again, so hopefully my reports helped make that possible.
- A SmartEnforcer exploit I discovered and wrote about five months ago was finally reported on SecurityFocus, as it apparently still exists. Idiots.
Finally, I also reported a couple more phpdoc errors in the Gallery code (one of which I proceeded to accidentally copy and paste into my code, which my mentor then pointed out, heh.. stupid me) and wrote a patch for their phpunit testing platform that was briefly committed and then rolled back because of philosophical concerns regarding Gallery’s testing methodology. It all started from a minor problem I was having with some unit tests I had written. I asked about it and wound up providing a very little patch to fix this problem, and from there it exploded into a big discussion, a revert of the patch, and now I have to write an entire additional abstraction layer for my module! It was quite unexpected, to say the least. It is for the best, though, as I learned something new and my code will be much better for it. It also lead to me having a great talk with my mentor, Andy a.k.a. “valiant,” in which he helped me out with this new bit that I have to tackle and also offered his very kind and sincere hope that, despite the frustrations of working with Zen Cart, I had enjoyed and benefited from doing this project. Which I can honestly say I have. :)
Tags: development, geekiness
I rock!
I am using feedburner for my podcasts and for some reason iTunes only picks up my Sky High review and it isn’t even titled correctly. Any particular ideas techie?
Have you read the maddox thing about blogs? The best part about that was definitely when he was bashing the people who put insane amounts of crazy links in their blogs.
And I definitely agree. I thought it was especially appropriate for this entry.
By the way, this crazy html had better work.
~Ethan
Yes, clearly the approximately 27 linked words out of the 723 in this post, or 3.7% of the entire post, constitute an “insane amount of crazy links.” I also apologize for the jarring nature of words that are written in colors from the cool and psychologically soothing end of the spectrum, such as those blue links. I hope you have an inexpensive analyst. Oh, and a link to the Maddox post would have been informative. ;)
Joey: I don’t know, I’ve only just started using FeedBurner and I don’t use iTunes. It probably gets the title from the text that links to the podcast. Also, make sure you’re pointing it to your RSS feed and not just your site (although I think when you first set it up it automatically finds the feeds and lets you pick).
Matt, you’re a great guy with great skills. You’re gonna do great. Hell, I’m coming with ya.