Technology

Content authorship is a new cool

Here is a quote directly from Google’s Inside Search blog:

We now support markup that enables websites to publicly link within their site from content to author pages. For example, if an author at The New York Times has written dozens of articles, using this markup, the webmaster can connect these articles with a New York Times author page. An author page describes and identifies the author, and can include things like the author’s bio, photo, articles and other links.

If you run a website with authored content, you’ll want to learn about authorship markup in our help center. The markup uses existing standards such as HTML5 (rel=”author”) and XFN (rel=”me”) to enable search engines and other web services to identify works by the same author across the web. If you’re already doing structured data markup using microdata from schema.org, we’ll interpret that authorship information as well.

[…]

We know that great content comes from great authors, and we’re looking closely at ways this markup could help us highlight authors and rank search results.

In simple terms, this means that you should make sure that all your content – no matter where it is published – identifies you as an author. This will help link all your content together, create your author profile, and use that as yet another criteria in ranking and searching. Those of you publishing with WordPress shouldn’t worry at all – adding authorship is either already done or will take a minor modification to the theme. WordPress provided both author pages and XFN markup out of the box for years.

24 hours of air traffic in a minutes

Here is a mesmerizing video that I picked up at Pestaola.gr – 24 hours of worldwide air traffic compressed into a minute or so video. Look at the density of that! Consider the complexity of the underlying technology. Consider how many people are affected but all of that. And that’s not even all worldwide traffic, since some of it escapes the technology used for this research.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4gkJTJIPWqo]

Trying out CloudFlare

I’ve heard a few mentions of CloudFlare before, but I never gave it much attention. Today, after reading this blog post, I decided to give it a try.

What’s more, that 30-40% increase that people used to see is now in the range of at least 50-60% as the team continues to find ways to make CloudFlare faster, while still offering security at the forefront.

What is CloudFlare, you ask? As per their own website:

CloudFlare protects and accelerates any website online. Once your website is a part of the CloudFlare community, its web traffic is routed through our intelligent global network. We automatically optimize the delivery of your web pages so your visitors get the fastest page load times and best performance. We also block threats and limit abusive bots and crawlers from wasting your bandwidth and server resources. The result: CloudFlare-powered websites see a significant improvement in performance and a decrease in spam and other attacks.

In simple terms: CloudFlare is very cheap (even free) content delivery network (CDN). It provides speed and security improvements, and it is extremely easy to configure. I know so, because I’ve already registered for the free account and configured this site to benefit from the service. Whether it actually lives up to all the hype – I don’t know yet, but I’ll see in the next few days. I suspect it does, since there are numerous positive reviews around the web. I will of course let you know. Especially if you remind me.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AaMWqyg_xMo]

Why reporting bugs is so important

Here is a quote from the Google Chrome 12 stable release blog post:

We’d also like to call particular attention to Sergey Glazunov’s $3133.7 reward. Although the linked bug is not of critical severity, it was accompanied by a beautiful chain of lesser severity bugs which demonstrated critical impact.

My focus here is not on the money that Sergey earned with his bug report, even though that is definitely an important and motivating factor. My focus is on the chain of the events. While this chain of events happens pretty much every time a bug is fixed, few people know about it. Maybe nobody, in fact, except for developers themselves.

The thing is that when a bug is discovered and fixed, pretty much every developer searches the code for problems similar to those brought up by the bug report. Be those issues typing mistakes, documentation inconsistencies, memory leaks, security issues, performance bottlenecks, or anything else – the code will be checked to make sure that the same problem doesn’t come up twice. From this perspective, I think that bug reports are so important not because of the specific bugs that they report, but because of those other bugs which aren’t yet fixed and probably aren’t yet reported.

Conclusion: every time you come across a bug in the application, don’t just work around it – take a few minutes of your time to report the problem properly to the developers. Chances are, they will fix some problems that you haven’t yet come across, but have pretty good chances to otherwise.

Sony hacked again. Should go open source

Sky reports that Sony got hacked and lost some of its customers data:

Sony has once again been targeted by a group of hackers who claim they gained access to details of one million customers.

By now, I think it is obvious that Sony’s security issues are architectural. It is not a matter of firewall misconfiguration or missed out input validation check. That would have been closed and forgotten months ago. Repeated attacks and extensive downtimes of PlayStation Network indicate that the problems are much deeper and much harder to find and fix.

I think the best option for them now is to go open source. If they open the protocols they use and server software they have – plenty of people will jump on it and create alternative servers and networks. All that will be needed after that is a firmware update that would allow gamers to connect to those alternative networks.