Hackszine.com: Web Archives

Archive: Web

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April 20, 2007

Firefox as a Web Development IDE

The Firefox Web Developer Extension and Firebug plugins are two very cool tools for editing and debugging HTML and CSS. Jeff Atwood of Coding Horror had this to say:

I can't imagine debugging a web app without these two essential tools, which transform Firefox into the Visual Studio of browsers. It'd be akin to writing a .NET application in Notepad.

Firebug, pictured above, can even assist with profiling and debugging your AJAX/Javascript code. You can evaluate javascript expressions and see how it effects the document in realtime, as well as view the "generated source," which comes in really handy when debugging code that populates elements in the page at runtime.

Firefox as an IDE -Link.

April 15, 2007

Using Google as a Proxy (or HOW TO: View MySpace at School)

Normally when you view a web page, your computer's browsing software makes a connection to the destination server, downloads the page's data, and displays it for you.

This would normally be the preferred way of doing things, but occasionally you'll find yourself on a work or school connection that disallows you from connecting to certain web sites. In these scenarios, what you need is a proxy. A proxy is a server or service that will connect to the blacklisted server on your behalf and send you back the results.

Now, you still need to directly access the proxy server, so it's important that it's not on the blacklist itself. It's very interesting that Google, a host unlikely to end up on most blacklists, has a couple of tools that can essentially act as a web proxy!

Google Proxy Trick #1
The first tool is Google's translation service. This service will dynamically download and translate any web page you request, and if you specify the "to" launguage as English (or your desired language), Google Translate will just spit out the destination document, acting as a simple proxy. Note that you used to be able to set the "from" and "to" language both as English to ensure no translation, but this feature seems to have been removed. However, I've found that if you specify Chinese to English (or anything to english) on an already english document, you usually get the exact text. The bonus of using the Chinese filter is that you can hover over any text and it'll give you the exact original text.

Just replace www.myspace.com in the URL below with a blocked site to see:
http://www.google.com/translate_c?langpair=zh%7Cen&u=http://www.myspace.com/

The only problem with this is that it doesn't proxy any of the images for you. Those are still coming directly from the destination server, so they will likely be filtered and all you'll see is the page text.

Google Proxy Trick #2
The second Google tool that can be used as a proxy service is the Google Wireless Transcoder. This service was designed to make web pages viewable on mobile phone browsers. It will download a destination site's web page, including images, and rework the entire page, on the fly, to fit into an average cell-phone's screen space.

To try it out, go to http://www.google.com/gwt/n and enter the url you'd like to view. You'll quickly see that most of the page formatting has been stripped out, leaving a very simple, single-column page. You'll also notice that all the images are scaled down to mobile phone optimized size. It's a bit of a downside, but google is actually downloading and sending the scaled versions from a google server. So, if you're on a blacklisted site, you'll still be able to view images - they'll just be smaller than usual.

On the plus side, I've found that 99% of MySpace templates look better using the Google Wireless Transcoder.

Update (my poor memory):
I have the long term memory of a goldfish. It looks like Brian Sawyer wrote about this back in January -Link. He also linked to another article on the topic of bypassing a blocked myspace connection, which I've also included below. Thanks, Brian!

Related:

April 11, 2007

Skitch Screencast

Click To Play

A couple months ago, I mentioned the new (Mac-only) Skitch screen-capture and annotation app from Plasq. At the time, I wasn't able to register for their mailing list (the captcha issue is fixed now, so do head over to sign up), but I just got a sneak peak at the private beta, and it's everything I'd hoped it would be. Check out the screencast for a quick walkthrough and my initial impressions. In brief, I can think of many productive uses for it, but the time I waste playing with it will likely negate all of them.- Link to video download.

Twitter and Jott spoofing

Make 518
Nitesh Dhanjani @ the ONLamp blog shows that it's fairly easy to spoof someone's Twitter & Jott - looks like you can require a PIN for twitter if you're worried-

Both Twitter and Jott authenticate users by their phone number. Twitter does this by validating users based upon the source of SMS messages sent to the phone number 40404 (US), and Jott does this by trusting the incoming Caller ID when someone calls 877-568-848. From a security perspective this means the following:
Anyone who knows your phone number can update your Twitter page by spoofing a SMS message, i.e. post a Twitter entry as you.
Anyone who knows your phone number can spoof his or her caller ID to send a Jott message as you.

Twitter and Jott Vulnerable to SMS and Caller ID Spoofing - O'Reilly ONLamp Blog - [via] Link.

April 8, 2007

AppleTV RSS plugin

Fullsize1947E7
AppleTV is becoming quite the hack box, check out this RSS plug in! Link.

April 5, 2007

S3 makes website hosting reasonable again?

100014192753
I keep hearing from friends each month about how Amazon's S3 is making website hosting reasonable for regular folks - here's another example from one of MAKE's kit makers -

Amazon's S3 (Simple Storage Service) isn't new, but its certainly gaining traction. Its a wonderful product for people who have a lot of content on their site (images, video, downloads, pdfs) but not a lot of money. Data storage costs $0.15 per GB-Month (prorated), and $0.20 per GB. No minimums, rounded up to the nearest cent.
...OK so, what's the point and what does this have to do with electronics, eh? Well one of the killer apps of open source and public domain electronics is documentation. That means media. And media storage, backup and transfer is extremely expensive for the everyday person. It becomes increasingly difficult to host a project when one digg-storm or slashdotting makes that 'free' webpage account go down.

S3 makes website hosting reasonable again - Link.

April 4, 2007

Free fonts

Font Preview
Here's a gigantic collection of 9800 free fonts, they seem to be pretty good and easy to search for stuff you might need. As always you get what you pay for, so (non)buyer beware - [via] Link.

March 13, 2007

Surf Anonymously Without a Trace

Surf Anonomously

Our resident Windows hacker, Preston Gralla, has another great article up at Computerworld, this time about maintaining your online privacy in the face of increased snooping from the government, web sites, and private businesses (an expanded update to a hack of the same name that originally appeared in Windows XP Hacks, 2E).

Related:

March 7, 2007

Mash Up the Hackszine Tag Cloud

Hackszine Tag Cloud

Love tag clouds? Check out this page, which displays the top 20 search terms that drive people to each O'Reilly domain, including Hackszine. As noted on that page, here are a few things to keep in mind about these visualizations:

The terms are organic, which means that these are terms that someone typed into a search engine (e.g., Google) and then followed a resulting link. (In contrast to a search term that someone entered into our own search box.)
While the keyword frequency does give some idea of what people are looking for, keep in mind that the word had to already be on our site in order for it to appear, and it had to be ranked highly enough for someone to find it.
These are raw search terms, so similar but slightly different terms will appear twice. For example, "web 2.0" and "web 2" may both appear.

Tired of tag clouds? We'd love to see how you'd process the data. Here's the data for Hackszine, formatted as JSON.

March 2, 2007

DIY Social Networking Sites

Westford Network on Ning

Everyone's favorite DIY Web 2.0 site builder, Ning, just relaunched with new features that make setting up your own social networking site easy as pie.

Thanks to Gina's handy walk-through, I was able to whip up a community site for my own hometown in just about no time at all. The initial features in my almost-instant setup include the ability to add photos (imported from your Flickr account, sent via email or phone, or uploaded from your computer desktop), share videos, start discussions, and basically just connect with your neighbors. I've been looking for something like this as a more community-driven add-on to my local placeblog, and this was just the ticket.

March 1, 2007

Pipe Your News Ticker

Pipes Picayune

Via the Hacks Authors' Blogs feed, we find Jim Bumgardner's Pipes Picayune & Daily Tube mashup news ticker:

Headlines from a BBC RSS feed are fed, via Y! Pipes, to my news ticker, which is implemented in Flash. Click on the spinning newspaper to read the story in full on the original website. This widget can work with any RSS feed, but I'm using the BBC because they tend to write short pithy headlines which fit my faux newspapers better.

You can include this widget (as well as others offered in Jim's bog post) in your own blog by copying the <iframe> code and specifying which feed you want to use.

UPDATE:

In the comments, Jim points out that he's now added an easy-to-use form for generating custom RSS tickers. Check out this feed of Hackszine:

Related:

Browse Craigslist Photos with Listpic

Listpic

Over at Parent Hacks, Asha Dornfest points to Listpic, a "visual Craigslist browser" that lets you search your city's Craigslist listings by keyword or category and display the results as image thumbnails. Price and location are included with the photo, mousing over reveals some details on the item, and clicking the image opens a pop-up of the detailed listing. This view helps weed out the listings with generic promotional photos, getting right to items that appear to be real, and becomes a big help for those of us who have a "no photo, no interest" policy for online bargain hunting.

February 27, 2007

Hacks Authors' Blogs: One Feed to Rule Them All

Hacks Authors' Feed

Ed note: In this guest post, veteran Hacks series author Paul Bausch takes on a challenge that's been on my todo list for a while, providing a solution that should be of immediate interest to all readers of this site and just might serve as a seed for future hacking around here.

I have a shelf full of O'Reilly Hacks books across a wide range of subjects. I contributed a couple in the Web Applications category, but I also have Hacks books about digital photography, hardware, scripting languages, gaming, and operating systems. The series has introduced me to a number of authors who are doing unusual things with technology in their particular area of expertise. I thought it would be interesting to follow each of these authors outside of the Hacks series by subscribing to their blogs, collectively. I figured it would be a good way to keep up with areas of technology that I'm not necessarily tuned into. I have a collection of blogs that I read to keep up with what's happening in Web Applications, but I don't have a sense of what's going on with gaming, for example.

So I went on a mission to gather the Hacks authors' blogs using the tools I know best: Web Applications. I started with an Amazon power query for books by O'Reilly with "Hacks" in the title via the Amazon API, and ended up with a list of 80 authors' full names. I plugged each name into Google by hand, adding the word "blog" (or if that didn't turn anything up, "hacks"). Then I visited the blog to make sure it was the Hacks author I was looking for, clicked the orange feed button in the Firefox address field to get the feed URL, and copied the URL to a text file. I ended up with a list of 40 feeds. (A 50% blogging rate among an arbitrary group isn't too shabby.)

I plugged the feeds into Google Reader, and renamed each feed the author's full name. Here's what the final list looks like (click for larger view):

Here's the list of feeds as OPML if you'd like to try it: Hacks Authors.

I've only been tuning into this list for a few days, but I'm already getting to know these authors in a new way. And I was right—I am finding out about developments in tech areas I don't normally tune into. I especially found Brian K. Jones's recent post about Fighting Specialization appropriate, something I wouldn't have seen otherwise.

Related:

February 10, 2007

LinkBack: Trackbacks Everywhere and Without the Spam

The concept of trackbacks and bidirectional linking has always been really intruiging to me, but it's such a difficult problem to solve, even if you ignore the spam issue... and that's awfully hard to ignore.

Ted Nelson coined the term Hypertext over 30 years ago, and articulated its principles, most of which have been ignored in the triumph of the Web. One of the principle elements of Nelson's vision that was left out of the web is the inherent bidirectionality of hyperlinks. This just means that a link from A to B should be visible, and traversable, from B to A as well. A simple idea, but suprisingly difficult to implement if you start with the sort of document-centric model that the WWW uses.

The problem is that bidirectional linking requires a certain level of cooperation between referencers and referencees. You can't force every publisher of every document to maintain a trackback-style referencing policy or system. Fortunately, however, you can expect that someone will be in the business of crawling and indexing the web, and the topic of references, as any fan of Pagerank will tell you, falls squarely into the search domain.

LinkBack is a Firefox/Greasemonkey plugin that queries Yahoo web services as your browse the web, displaying incoming links for the web pages that you visit. It's pretty much like using the "link:" qualifier in a Google search, except that it does this automatically for you for every page that you visit, showing the results in a semi-transparent floating div over the document you are viewing.

Of course, there are privacy issues with sending all your browsing information to Yahoo, and the results are only as good as the search engine is capable, but it's a step in the right direction, and for the most part, it works. -Link.

February 4, 2007

Negative Captcha

Here's an interesting thought. The flip side of "prove you aren't a robot," is "prove you are human."

Though it's no easier to prove, at least it places the onus of proof on the spam bot and not your human guests. It's subtle, but there's a philisophical difference between requiring people to do something that is difficult for a machine, versus asking the machine to do what a real human will do naturally.

Damien Katz writes about one way to approach this problem with the use of CSS.

It's a neat idea, instead of asking the user to prove he's human, it instead tricks the spam bot into revealing it's a bot. It does this with a email field that is hidden from the user by CSS.

When a human user fills out the form, the hidden field will always be blank. But when filled out by a spam bot, it doesn't know the field is supposed to be hidden, so it adds a bogus email address and submits the form. When the back-end code sees the email in the posting, it knows the email was filled in by a bot and ignores the whole submission.

It's not perfect—this won't stop custom-coded spam attacks—but it does kill some of the automated, roving, spider-based comment spam. Working negative captcha methods into a dynamic changing-key system (much like current captcha but transparent to your human users) is the obvious next step, and I bet we'll be seeing (or should I say "not seeing") stuff like this very soon. - Link.

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