Thursday, November 20, 2003

Anti-BlogSpam Measures Current anti-blogspam measures focus on keeping spam out of weblogs. I'm beginning to wonder if this is the correct approach. Why? Because this only provides incentive for the spammers to spam even more. I would guess a lot of blogspam currently goes undetected by blog owners and stays on their weblogs doing exactly what the spammers want it to do:... (365 words, 19 Comments)

Wednesday, November 19, 2003

Unified Data Access For .NET? .NOT like that! Paschal points to a article by Philip Miseldine on how to use the Factory Pattern to achieve database independence in your .NET code. The article starts off with an explanation on how the Factory pattern works. The fact that the author felt this needed explaining shows a difference between the .NET world (where many developers are still relatively new to... (407 words, 13 Comments)

SharpReader 0.9.3.2 SharpReader 0.9.3.2 is now available at sharpreader.net. Changes since the last version are: Improved discovery of links between articles by fixing some minor bugs in the Regex used to find links in item-descriptions (with the help of Roy Osherove's Regulator) Returned to pre-0.9.3 algorithm for item comparisons - new algorithm was causing duplicate items in some feeds. Better memory cleanup... (151 words, 39 Comments)

Tuesday, November 18, 2003

Post #100 When I started this weblog, I wasn't sure if I was going to get much beyond post #1. As I mentioned in that first post, I had tried to setup a weblog before but just could not get into the habit of posting regularly. One of the reasons I decided to give it another try was SharpReader, which was first... (316 words, 4 Comments)

Wednesday, November 12, 2003

Dynamic ListView in .NET? I've got a question for all you .NET gurus out there: is there any way to, instead of populating a ListView with say 10,000 items, simply tell it that there is a total of 10,000 items (so the scrollbar can be initialized properly), and then catch some kind of event (like ListView.OnShowItem(int itemNum)) that I can use to dynamically set... (106 words, 15 Comments)

Sunday, November 9, 2003

SharpReader 0.9.3.1 SharpReader 0.9.3.1 is now available for download at sharpreader.net. This version contains two bugfixes, one of which had the potential of losing all saved items in a feed upon refresh. If you are currently running SharpReader 0.9.3, I recommend you upgrade to 0.9.3.1 ASAP to fix this bug.... (49 words, 23 Comments)

Saturday, November 8, 2003

Conversation with a Bottom Feeder Some of us deal with comment spam the easy way - we install MT-BlackList and the problem pretty much goes away by itself. Then there are those like Joseph Duemer who decide to contact and challenge their spammer. Not necessarily an approach that will be very effective, but it sure makes for an interesting read...... (56 words, 3 Comments)

Friday, November 7, 2003

To Spam or Anti-Spam, that is the question... If there's one type of spam that gets on my nerves more than any other, it is spam that promotes anti-spam tools. Sure, anyone that reads this spam is clearly in need of some protection, but by doing this, the anti-spammer becomes a spammer. And if someone has a spam-problem, can they really trust a spammer to help them? I... (605 words, 15 Comments)

SharpReader 0.9.3 SharpReader 0.9.3 is now available for download at sharpreader.net. Changes since the last version are: .NET 1.1 only. Go to windowsupdate.microsoft.com to upgrade if you currently only have .NET 1.0 installed Added support for HTTP Authentication (either through a username:pwd@url, or through a popup authentication dialog) FeedValidator.org url change Multi-select enabled in headline-view Handle feed:// protocol. Links to a feed:rss-url... (293 words, 34 Comments)

Saturday, November 1, 2003

ABC Feeds - what the ... ? Dave posted a few days ago that ABC News now has 23 RSS feeds. What surprised me is that, as keeper of the RSS spec (OK - one of three keepers nowadays), he failed to comment on the unusual way these feeds are set up. First of all, it uses RSS 0.93 with the http://backend.userland.com/rss093 namespace, but as far as... (357 words, 14 Comments)