=^.^=

FurFinding: Neat Stuff I Found While Cleaning up the Furry Sites Database

• karma

I've been going through the furry sites database at http://yiffy.tk/review.php lately to keep dead sites out of the new FurFinder index and categorize those not already in The Furnpike. Here's some of the neat things I've found:

@Silvermanes, home of Greycats and the "Furr Friends":

A classic frames-and-autoplaying-music site. Better, the autoplaying music is the theme from Friends, which the Furr Friends are supposedly some sort of furry take on. If you could distill the 90s from this site and put it into a jar you might stand to make a mint.

Hackles:

Hackles may end up in the running for most durable webcomic ever one day. The titular character is a UNIX geeky dog it started in 2001. By 2004, the creators had split up and the comic ended - but as of today the domain is registered until 2021.

Infurmation Technology:

Another webcomic from the stone age, Infurmation Technology's last post is dated Thursday September 13, 2001. The latest "comic" is a photo of the rubble at ground zero. It's like someone stuffed it in a ziploc bag and forgot it at the back of the freezer for 12 years.

Molotov Cocktail:

This comic ends in 2007 on a humorously naive note. Not only would the place of conservatives and liberals be switched by most outside observers but it would appear the liberal "aganda" [sic] wasn't in such bad shape after all if it would lead to two democratic terms not a year later. Furry Republicans: the denial is as thick as pudding here.

Foxee.net:

Talk about a blast from the past:

System Requirements For This Website
Intel® Pentium 166 or compatible microprocessor or higher
32MB Random Access Memory (RAM) or higher
VGA or higher resolution video adapter
Microsoft Windows 95, 98, NT 4.0, Me, 2000, XP, or Vista
Microsoft Internet Explorer 4 or Later
Windows-compatible sound card
Headphones or Speakers
Administrator privileges on your computer

Google Ends Free Version of Google Apps

• karma

Before you soil your trousers, those domains which have already been registered with a free version of google apps will continue to be free. That doesn't make the news any less devastating to those of us whom have taken advantage of the free service for resale/value-added hosting:

Hello from Google,

Here's some important news about Google Apps—but don't worry, there's no need for you to take any action. We just want you to know that we're making a change to the packages we offer.

Starting today, we're no longer accepting new sign-ups for the free version of Google Apps (the version you're currently using). Because you're already a customer, this change has no impact on your service, and you can continue to use Google Apps for free.

Should you ever want to upgrade to Google Apps for Business, you'll enjoy benefits such as 24/7 customer support, a 25 GB inbox, business controls, our 99.9% uptime guarantee, unlimited users and more for just $5 per user, per month.

You can learn more about this change in our Help Center or on the Enterprise Blog.

Thank you for using Google Apps.

Clay Bavor
Director, Google Apps

Thanks Clay. You're a dick. $5 per user per month is preventatively steep when taken into consideration the fact that most GoDaddy resellers can deliver 10 accounts with unlimited storage for $2.50 per month all together.

Say Alice runs a temp agency. She has 30 employees and all of them need e-mail addresses. If Alice wants to use Google Apps for her company's e-mail service provider she will pay $150 per month ($1,500 if she pays yearly) or 38 times what her shared website hosting plan costs.

The downside to third party mail providers like GoDaddy is they are notoriously oversold and dripping with spammers. That can affect your mail's deliverability through collateral damage (RBLs, subnet reputaion, etc.).

The other major point in Google's favour is their first rate spam filter. Being the unfortunate administrator of a few inherited, prehistoric mail servers nothing makes my skin crawl more than the thought of making a bunch of e-mail servers and in-sourcing all of my e-mail operations. Over time, in dealing with the prehistoric mail servers, it has become necessery to put a spam firewall in front of another spam firewall just to keep the first one from overloading. Maintaining even a modern e-mail system is similarly an arms race.

I have tried to sell clients on the concept of $5/user/month e-mail accounts since Google Apps began and they all look at me like I'm an idiot. If the choice wasn't between free and obscene I (and I would assume many others) would not have taken advantage of the system in quite the proportion that we did.

The free ride is over. For now. I'm sure it won't take long for the next big thing in free e-mail to make itself evident - and when it does Google can take a hike.

Disable Form Autocomplete

• karma

Disabling a visitor's browser's built-in form autocomplete feature sounds like it should be a simple enough task, but like many seemingly mundane things in web design it's a bit asinine. I have personally never had to do this until yesterday when I made an AJAX-based autocompleting search field and realized it didn't do much good hiding behind the browser's. It could also be useful to avert the visitor's autocomplete where the data shouldn't be remembered by the browser (like credit card numbers) or re-entered for verification (like e-mail addresses).

The easiest method (and the one with which I went) is to add the

autocomplete="off"

attribute to your <form> or individual <input> tags. According to Mozilla Developer Network's How to Turn Off Form Autocompletion:

This form attribute was first introduced in Microsoft's Internet Explorer 5. Netscape introduced it in version 6.2 -- in prior versions, this attribute is ignored. The autocomplete attribute was added at the insistance of banks and card issuers, but prior to HTML5 was never part of an official standard.

In practical terms this means the autocomplete attribute is perfectly valid and there is no good reason you shouldn't use it. In ideological terms, unless you are using it in an HTML5 document, the attribute is not valid HTML and will fail a validation test.

Sometimes it's OK to be a rebel. Sometimes there's a cheat code, though. It's possible to set this attribute in JavaScript and produce flawless HTML. There is only one drawback: those with JavaScript disabled (no one) will not be affected:

var q = document.getElementById('query');
q.autocomplete = 'off';

An alternative I thought of but rejected on the grounds that it would make untidy URLs is the use of hidden <input>s and the onchange event handler. It could work well for POSTed forms, however:

<input type="hidden" name="query" id="query">
<input type="text" name="<?php echo md5(time()); ?>" onchange="document.getElementById('query').value = this.value;">

FurFinding: The Spammedest Page Ever

• karma

Do you remember the good old days before CAPTCHAs? It was a simpler time - bots spammed e-mail accounts, not websites. Few people thought of the security implications of accepting user input on their sites, even successful commercial outfits.

I've been doing a little tinkering with FurFinder lately and have come across a page which may indicate the year in which the paradigm shifted.

With the first post dated December 18, 2000 http://www.catswithhands.com/guestbook.html is a pre-Web 2.0 guestbook which permitted untested, unmoderated public write access for 6 years. It is 9.5MB long.

There are

$ grep "<b>Realname: </b>" guestbook.html | wc -l
4093

entries.

The spam began in earnest in 2004, after which there are only two or three posts by humans - a vivid illustration of how corrossive unchecked web spam can be to your image and audience.

Why your UserAgent is a Fat Liar

• karma

I just ran across this entertaining article by Aaron Anderson and thought I'd share it:

History of the browser user-agent string

It reads like a trip down memory lane; rife with the jaded nostalgia we whom have suffered every browser since Mosaic share.

And then Google built Chrome, and Chrome used Webkit, and it was like Safari, and wanted pages built for Safari, and so pretended to be Safari. And thus Chrome used WebKit, and pretended to be Safari, and WebKit pretended to be KHTML, and KHTML pretended to be Gecko, and all browsers pretended to be Mozilla, and Chrome called itself Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/0.2.149.27 Safari/525.13, and the user agent string was a complete mess, and near useless, and everyone pretended to be everyone else, and confusion abounded.