Programming

I was waiting at the Honda dealership the other day, and reluctantly picked up the copy of the Metro News there after having read the other papers. Several pages in, there's a column by a fellow named Paul Sullivan called A massive effort to create a giant nerd.

One of 2010's tech flops was the Gawker breakin. While their first mistake was actively taunting the 4chan-ers, the breakin has had many repercussions. Most of the database is available as a torrent. A great majority of the weak passwords are compromised.

LinkedIn took it upon itself to have everyone change their passwords. Whether or not this is limited to users who have email addresses in the published torrent I'm not sure.

What does this mean?

Diaspora, the project started with the aim of building a decentralized social network has had its popularity dropping like a stone. It may not be dead, but after all the hype that was promised the alpha lacked a lot of what was promised, and the software had major (but perhaps not unsolvable) security problems.

This post is the first part in a series about building a modern website. I'd appreciate feedback on what other topics people would have me cover. If you have any ideas or any other feedback, please leave a comment at the end of the article. I also recommend that you subscribe to my RSS feed, which will inform you when future posts are made.

Reasons for this Series

There are many old website still on the web. Many but not all are bad: some are just old and tired.. Perhaps you're reading this because....

Why does the URI::Escape module require Business::ISBN?

Anybody?

If you're working on some feature that requires you to create many user accounts, here's a tip I find helpful. Use a service like Spaml that creates disposable email accounts just by going to the site.

Drupal allows valid email addresses as usernames. If you can reduce your user creation process to just those fields which accept as valid an email address, you can just go down the form, tab, ctrl+v, tab... and then hit 'Submit'.

Here's some food for thought. Comments and further elaborations are encouraged.

Xeno's Paradox

in order to do A, B and C you need to do D and E, and in order to do C and D you need to do F... on and on, with further requirements added onto the end of the chain. The amount of progress toward the goal is constant, while at the same time the amount of work required to reach the goal remains constant.

Concrete Wall

In my experience, there are three different categories of site slowdown and delay:

• Imperceptible
• Perceptible
• Unusable

Other distinctions really don't matter so much. The user doesn't care whether the page load latency is 10 seconds or 15 seconds. They're just going to leave.

The progression of a delay is:

Imperceptible -> Perceptible -> Unusable

I'm amazed how quickly spambots find a new site. Especially the comment spammers. When I had this on a temp URL, it had been found within two weeks. My solution? Turn off anonymous commenting. Easy, because it didn't matter, and there were no users to speak of.

But six hours after I pushed this site public, the comment spammers were at it again. Formerly, the site was running on wordpress. There, I used spam karma 2 to stem the tide: it worked really well.

... that they seldom come true. And in the age of the forever web making bold but inevitably false predictions is eventually going to get fingers poked at you.

Almost a year ago now, podcasting jockey Chris Pirillo predicted that Drupal was dying because of a shortage of 'intelligent' developers.

I don't know if he's forgotten his economics lessons, but low supply means one of two things: