Category: The Web Sucks

I built a little Pastafarian Calendar website and iCalendar feed. Now you too can know what holy day the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster is observing each day! Thanks to Noam for the inspiration.

Timely‘s WordPress Calendar plugin doesn’t interoperate well with RFC 2445 iCalendar feeds that contain all-day untimed events specified by both DTSTART and a DURATION:P1D. Instead of interpreting them as a one-day all-day event, it seems to interpret them as a two-day event. I examined a half-dozen calendar apps to see how they generate these kinds […]

My friend and colleague Ray Sun writes about Inventing Favicon.ico on his blog. Nice trip down memory lane, when we could get stuff done in a matter of hours and touch the lives of hundreds of millions of users.

htdig has been retired from radwin.org. Many years ago I set up a site search on radwin.org using a tool called ht://Dig. It was a C/C++ app that would spider/crawl a website and also serve out search results in an HTML-friendly fashion through a CGI. The rest of the world moved onto Lucene/Solr, but I never […]

It took me all of 10 minutes, and I just sped up Hebcal.com by enabling Apache mod_deflate on DreamHost. I used the Google PageSpeed Insights tool to measure the performance of Hebcal, and it complained that we weren’t gzip-compressing HTML, CSS, or JavaScript. Turns out this is not enabled on DreamHost sites by default. What a surprise! So […]

I’ve been maintaining a collection of UTF-8 resources at utf-8.com for the past 13 years. I registered the domain name back in 1999 when I began working on internationalization and character sets. After years of looking like I hand-coded the page in Emacs html-mode (which I did), I finally decided to move to a more modern […]

radwin.org got compromised recently due to some sort of server-side vulnerability. Was it a MovableType bug? Some stale version of phpBB or a vulnerability in the ancient copy of PHP4 itself? Who the heck knows. I did a slash and burn and removed all stale PHP/CGI stuff and upgraded to PHP5. Looks like I got […]

unsolicitedDave got a Google malware warning, so I upgraded MovableType. I hope everything is fixed now.

Came across a couple of good tools today that replace the cool Photocastr app to give you batch/bulk access to your Flickr images in various sizes/resolutions: Flickr Feed Image Re-sizer from Yahoo! Pipes. I’m using this to subscribe feeds in iPhoto and also for a Mac OS X screensaver. Default RSS feeds from Flickr only […]

The marketing department at my company produced a slick video of browser hijacking based on some of our research.