Jay Hollingum - Works in IT

After some waiting around since goo.gl went live and became available to the general public in September 2010, the API has finally been released this week. Documentation can be found at http://code.google.com/apis/urlshortener/overview.html and a "Getting Started" guide can be found at http://code.google.com/apis/urlshortener/v1/getting_started.html There has been eager anticipation waiting for the release of the API and this should be pretty cool for allowing developers to use Google's URL Shortener in their own applications and projects. Thanks to Google and the URL Shortener Team for releasing this. Blog post announcing release:  http://googlecode.blogspot.com/2011/01/google-url-shortener-gets-api.html

Not really as alarming as the post title suggests but a post from Trend Micro's blog highlights a few surprising and a few unsurprising dangers on the internet from 2010. Trend Micro's blog:  http://blog.trendmicro.com/ Original post:  http://blog.trendmicro.com/2010s-most-dangerous-list/ In summary: Riskiest hardware: German ID card readers Riskiest website software: Wordpress Most dangerous IP:  Internet Relay Chat (IRC) Riskiest OS:  Apple’s Mac OS X Most dangerous website: Google Most dangerous social network: Facebook Most dangerous top level domain: CO.CC Riskiest file format: PDF More details are given in the original post from Trend Micro.

If you're a Google Website Optimiser user then you've probably already received and read the email below. If you've not, but do use Google Website Optimiser, then you may need to update your code to prevent an XSS attack. There's no mention of the fix or issue on  http://websiteoptimizer.blogspot.com/ , but in the interests of getting people up to speed as quickly as possible here is a copy of the email containing the fix needed, with thanks to Trevor Claiborne from Google. This applies to any scripts created before December 3rd, 2010. Dear Website Optimizer user, We are writing to inform you of a potential security issue with Website Optimizer. By exploiting a vulnerability in the Website Optimizer Control Script, an attacker might be able to execute malicious code on your site using a Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) attack. This attack can only take place if a website or browser has already been compromised by a separate attack. While the immediate probability of...

The "semantic web" as a theory has been around for ages and I remember working with people, a decade ago, who were investigating how to build a semantic web. The semantic web, a term coined by Sir Tim Berners-lee, is a vision that would allow automated agents and software to access the Web intelligently, via machine-readable metadata embedded within content. There are a number of standards, tools, methodologies and technologies around that have been created to aid in the development of a semantic web, yet it is still unrealised and alludes the world. There are a number of reasons for this including the physical size of the web, the vastness of knowledge and how to categorise it all into suitable classes, and the completeness, consistency and standardisation of information, to name just a few issues to deal with. I imagine some even question whether it is truly possible due to the sheer scale and requirements involved. Probably the biggest impact of working towards a s...

So the time has come to move to a more advanced blog engine for my blog. blogger.com , Google's blogging service, has served me well. It's incredibly easy to use and to get started with, along with having some great features such as inbuilt stats; however now I need a few more advanced features and greater control over the blog. There's a vast array of blog engines out there, some free, some paid for, some hosted, some self-hosted, and picking which one is best or the right choice could be a little bit tricky. This article from Mashable lists most of the main options and bigger players -  http://mashable.com/2007/08/06/free-blog-hosts/ . There are a few parameters that I've kind of decided on Ease of installation/compatibility and support with web hosts Simple to use. I don't want to spend ages clicking around just to add a post or format it. Feature rich and well supported. Most blog engines should have a fairly standard set of features now such RSS/ATOM fe...

Bing, Microsoft's search engine , comes with a few tools for webmasters to track their websites' stats. These tools are in no way as advanced as Google Analytics , but do let you see how a site is being crawled and indexed by Bing, and also allows for better control of submitting sitemaps to Bing. Setting up Bing tracking and statistics for Blogger, Google's blog publishing service , is pretty straightforward, assuming you have a blog already set up on Blogger!! All that's needed is: Sign in to Bing's webmaster toolbox (you'll need a Windows Live ID). Enter URL and get verification code for your blog. Add the verification code to the blogger template and save. Return to Bing's Webmaster Toolbox and finally verify the blog. Sign in to Bing's Webmaster Toolbox Go to Bing's Webmaster Toolbox at http://www.bing.com/toolbox/webmasters/ and sign in. If you don't have a Windows Live ID, you'll need to sign up. Once signed in, click ...

There are hundreds of URL shorteners around these days such as bit.ly tinyurl.com moourl.com tiny.cc  and ow.ly with the bigger websites even creating their own URL shortening services. Now Google have stepped in to the ring with their own URL shortening service, goo.gl . Although goo.gl URLs have been appearing in Google products for some time, they have only just released a website for shortening any URL. The blog posting announcing the release can be found on their social web blog at http://googlesocialweb.blogspot.com/2010/09/google-url-shortener-gets-website.html . Given the resources behind Google, this will probably be one of the most stable and secure URL shorteners, and is unlikely to go the way of some such as tr.im .

When Google's web browser, Chrome , first came out, as quick and simple as it was, it seemed to lack a few of the extensions and features that were useful in Mozilla FireFox , especially for developers. Recently though, after having trouble with massive memory leaks in FireFox ( http://kb.mozillazine.org/Memory_Leak ), Chrome got another try out ( Internet Explorer still seems to take forever to load up and feels like its dominating the browsing experience). No surprises in Chrome's simplicity, speed and efficiency, and the way it neatly lets you get on with browsing the web. It also come with nifty little developer tools, showing download speeds, CSS/HTML structure, access to scripts, all of which can be found from the page button link as shown in the video below, using the Page button > Developer > Developer tools link (or key combination CTRL + SHIFT + I). As always it boils down to personal preference and it's good that there is this choice (nevermind the be...

I'm kind of confused about  Apple's iPad  and not really sure where it's going to fit in, in gadget world. Too big to be carried in the pocket and whipped out to browse the internet whilst stuck on the train, yet not feature rich enough to have anything meaningful that many smart phones or netbooks don't already have or can do, except the pretty nice bookcase and page turning stuff. To quote Jimmy Carr "It's like somebody inventing the wheel, then a year later saying 'Look! I've invented an even bigger wheel'." Although that chair Steve Jobs sat in whilst announcing it looked quite cool. Anyways, making the rounds on the internet now is a youtube video of a mock up that has been created of a Chrome OS UI on a tablet from Google. Admittedly it's only a concept from a Chrome designer posted on a third party site probably done in his spare time, but worth keeping an eye on and probably indicating that Apple won't have it all it's ow...