Andrei Zmievski

In the previous post I mentioned that I was going to migrate to Google account on FeedBurner using a trick to avoid spamming the subscribers with old posts. The trick seemed to work fine, so here’s the explanation. I use WordPress (2.6), but this can be generalized to other systems. In wp-includes/feed-rss2.php, find the beginning of the post loop – the while( have_posts() ) line – and add another one after it to exclude the posts dated earlier than the migration date from the feed. It should look something like this:

 <?php while( have_posts()) : the_post();
 if (get_post_time() < strtotime('2009-03-01')) continue;

The end result of this is that your feed will contain only the items published after the specified date. This may be a bit strange for new subscribers, so I made a new blog post so as not to keep my feed completely empty, but for existing ones it should be transparent.

In general, I want to say that Google has completely mishandled this transition after their acquisition of FeedBurner. Chris Shiflett already explained what problems he saw with it, but I found one more: they broke the Awareness API. I noticed this because my feed statistics were all 0. Turns out that the old API URL (http://api.feedburner.com/) was gone, and you had to use the new one (http://feedburner.google.com/api). Breaking the legacy API URLs is a major violation of the contract you make with the users when you publish the API. At the very least, Google should have silently redirected the requests to the new API instead of doing the most egregious thing possible and simply removing the old URL. Shame on you, Google.

If you use FeedBurner, you probably know that they were acquired by Google recently. They are also forcing you to migrate your account to Google on the next login. This presents a couple of issues detailed by Chris Shiflett in his post.

I’m going to attempt to avoid spamming my subscribers with a ton of recent posts by making sure that the feed contains only the posts dated after the migration. Chris and I are pretty sure that it will work, but I guess the only way is to push the button and see. If this works, I’ll post a quick explanation of how to hack WordPress to modify your feed this way.

I was excited to find out yesterday that my good friend Jon Tan has joined some more of my good friends at OmniTI as their new Creative Director. I met Jon at OSCON in Portland this year and he’s a fantastic fellow — great designer with an eye for typography, tech guru, fine cocktail connoiseur and a very funny man indeed. He’ll fit right into the awesome motley crew at OmniTI. Congrats, Jon!

Sometime in the past couple of weeks, there apparently has been an attack on my domain, most likely via DNS cache poisoning. The end result was that a large number of visitors to the site saw some infelicitous pr0n content, instead of the usual blog. Rest assured, it was not an attempt on my part to make some extra cash by displaying someone else’s fleshy bits to drooling eager masses. No, there are easier ways of getting beer money. I am not sure whether this was a deliberate attack or whether my domain was simply unfortunate enough to get on someone’s list, but I sincerely apologize to those of you who were exposed — pun intended — to that content.

I have taken steps to fix the DNS issues and make sure that this kind of thing would be very hard to repeat. Unfortunately, during this time the search engines, such as Yahoo! and Google, have indexed the pr0n content under as though belonging to my domain and it might take a few days for it to clear out. Meanwhile, I hope you will return and check out some cool new things that should be coming shortly.

7777

Accidentally looked at the title bar of Mail.app after hitting Send today and noticed that I’ve sent 7777 messages since January 1, 2004. Lucky sevens!

I am in the process of setting up a photoblog, and I’d love to have a small logo (and perhaps a favicon) to stick on it. Given that my skills with graphic design are limited to — and I’m being generous here — picking out a font that looks nice but is unlikely to induce violent frothing rage from everyone who’s been exposed to entirely too many pages written exclusively in Comics Sans… I thought I’d ask the faithful readers who’ve hopefully extracted a smidge of useful information (or just a chuckle) from some of my postings. Can one of you designer demigods help me out with this?

Please contact me directly via About page.

Thanks to Evan, the RSS autodiscovery on my linkblog is now fixed. Consider this another opportunity to subscribe.

Hey, you. Not, not you. You, the one reading this blog. Did you know that I now also have a linkblog that has the best links that I come across that day? You should read it. And subscribe to it too. And then read it again. It’ll be funny, thought-provoking, and educational. And it’ll help you lose weight. Oh, and get the girl or boy you’re after. Seriously, 4 out of every 5 bloggers agree. So, go ahead, click on it. You know you want to. See you there.

Throughout the day I usually come across a number of links that I want to share with people. I usually archive them on MyWeb, but I thought that it wouldn’t hurt to have them on my site as well. So, following Jeremy Zawodny’s example, I am launching a linkblog. The RSS feed of the links is available as well.

If these are for real, I’ve gotta get me one (or two) of those.

UPDATE: I was kidding, of course.