Notice of Probable Downtime
29 November 2007This site (and Optimalbrowser.com) will be likely be intermittently available starting this evening (U.S. Eastern time) and lasting for a day or so while I move servers.
Archive for November, 2007
Weird Traffic
18 November 2007I just saw some weird traffic on this blog. Last week, I was testing a plugin when it went a little haywire and automatically created a bunch of posts (based on my NewsGator clippings, including a lot of law related and gadget related topics -- things I read about but don't write about). And then because I have Alex King's twitter tools installed, each of those new posts was propagated to twitter, too.
Now, I thought that this little stunt probably would have pissed people off. Instead (maybe), I saw a huge spike in traffic to this blog -- more than three times the usual traffic.
I'm assuming that these "visitors" were just bots that were monitoring the twitter public timeline, but the referrer logs don't back that up (although that doesn't necessarily mean anything).
Character Encoding Help
17 November 2007Tom Morris is pulling his hair out dealing with XML character encoding issues. I've gone through this myself. I found that the SimplePie feed parser has great logic for dealing with this, so I adapted it to my needs in my PHP class XMLParseIntoArray. I think I've expanded on SimplePie's approach a bit, but it's still a work in progress. YMMV. Hope this helps.
