Some components for the “other” information infrastructure on the internet (rss feed etc)

Disclaimer: this started essentially as note-to-self listing a few interesting projects to spare me another internet search session.

RSS feeds (and their twin brothers Atom) are ubiquitous over the internet making it possible to easily get a summary of the latest publications of a given website.

Interestingly a huge amount of websites produce this kind of feeds (most blogs obviously but also sites like  twitter[en]) and from this point of view the RSS format is quite lively.

But on the consumer side, I’m pretty  disappointed with the “offer” in terms of RSS readers. Over the time I’ve tested several well-known desktop readers (liferea, rssowl, thunderbird…) and most of then ended up synchronizing with Google Reader. This one has consequently come to be my main newsreader and it appears to me as clearly dominating the world of internet based newsreader. However such a predominance is not that much a good sign1.

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  1. a quick glimpse at HackerNews shows that people are regularly trying to reinvent the newsreader service so there is hope I guess []

Bright side of an exploit ?

So, my website (tibonihoo.net) has been recently hacked… No apparent effect but a bunch of undercover redirections and a load of php one-liners to “do stuff” with cookies.

Apparently I’m not the only one to have suffered from this and everyting comes from a security hole in zenphoto (that I use to manage my photo gallery).

 

The bright side of things:

  • it’s a good incentive to think a bit more about the security of my website and its data
  • it’s a good reminder to suscribe to the right rss feed for zenphoto (the former has suddently changed, without me paying attention)
  • it’s a good criteria to clean-up useless plugins (goodbye wp-security-scan that brillantly failed to detect anything)
  • it’s a good time to thank Dreamhost‘s team that answered my question pretty quickly
  • it’s the perfect occasion for you, dear visitors, to clean up your browser’s cookies (because the aim of the exploit is not clear, but visitor’s cookies clearly seemed to be involved).