Monday, 28th October 2002
Comment spammers
I suppose it was only a matter of time. Phil Ringnalda reports on a spam attack on his blog in which a spammer used a script to systematically spam the comments section of every entry, using a piece of code targetted at Moveable Type. Phil cut the spammer off after only 120 spams (and used mySQL to wipe out the spam in a few seconds) but this is still a very worrying precedent. Back in August I blogged a spamming company that targetted simple web based bulletin boards like WWWBoard—it looks like they (or someone like them) have discovered blogs.
[... 154 words]Validator web service please
Scott Andrew calls for an XML-RPC or SOAP interface to the new W3C HTML Validator (currently in beta). I’ve been hoping for something for this like ages—if the W3C don’t do it it would be great if someone else set this up (the validator is open source but the bandwidth required for such an undertaking would probably be pretty high).
Cache-22
I haven’t been checking my referrer logs recently, so it was a nice surprise to see that Richard from Incutio has finished redesigning his blog and is now back to updating it frequently. He also has Pingback (implemented using IXR) and is pinging blo.gs when he updates.
Apple Internet Developer
Apple have an excellent site called Internet Developer, with articles covering a wide range of web development topics from HTML and CSS right through to Using SOAP with PHP.
W3C validator web service
Earlier today I mentioned how useful a web service interface to the new W3C validator would be. Tom Gilder pointed out in the comments that the validator now has an XML interface:
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