AVINASH 2.0

Google’s Orkut Hit By An XSS Worm

A blogger reports that Orkut, the Google-owned social network, has been hit by an XSS worm that seems to have infected over 400K Orkut users.

From the blog:

Right at this very moment, a cross-site script has been spreading like wildfire in Orkut communities due to a flaw in Google’s Orkut.

If you’ve read the following scrapbook entry in Orkut

“2008 vem ai… que ele comece mto bem para vc”

from one of your friends, you’re infected. Simply viewing the message alone is sufficient for your Orkut account to be added a new community named “Infectados pelo V�rus do Orkut” and be an unwilling new host for the worm. At the time of this writing, the number of Orkut members in Infectados pelo V�rus do Orkut is already at the 400K mark.

But fret not ’cause according to the author of the worm, Rodrigo Lacerda, this script is not malicious in any way, well except for making you an unwitting participant of his experiment.

Internet Explorer 8 Passes The Acid2 Test

Just a few days ago, I was pissed off @ Microsoft ’cause of their Internet Explorer and today I read this good news:

As a team, we�ve spent the last year heads down working hard on IE8. Last week, we achieved an important milestone that should interest web developers. IE8 now renders the �Acid2 Face� correctly in IE8 standards mode.

Looks like the future is bright for Web designers.

Money For Nothing – Seth Godin

Money For Nothing is Seth Godin’s new ebook for people who have more talent than cash.

It turns out that the new playing field enforced by the search engines is eliminating many of the shortcuts that used to be effective. In other words, the best way is the long way. The long way is to create content that is updated, unique and useful. Again and again we see that sites that do all three manage to get more than their fair share of traffic. So, I guess the title of the ebook is a bit misleading. The clicks don’t cost money, but they do take effort. That’s good news for people who have more talent than cash.

Create Your Own TinyURL Site

� using Shorty. From the page:

Shorty is a simple tool for creating shorter, human- readable links from long URLs. You install Shorty on your server, so the links you create with it never go away. You can also manage your links and see how often people click on them.

Check out the live demo.

[WordPress] Filter Adult SPAM

If you use WordPress as your blogging platform and tired of receiving tons of viagra and related SPAM, bot generated comments, make use of the WordPress Comment Blacklist feature. You can find this feature in Admin CP >> Options >> Discussion.

You can use this feature to stop almost 95% SPAM messages. I’ve been using this option for past couple of months and find it pretty helpful. Just add ‘viagra’ and similar words in the Comment Blacklist box and see the magic!

Human Wings!!

What else can I show you? Oh, almost forgot that I just watched an incredible video that shows how a human can fly like a flying squirrel, without using a parachute. Whatever it is, the landing process sounds like a call to death. Visit this New York Times page to read the full news article: Flying Humans, Hoping to Land With no Chute

Back in January, I wrote about Jet Wings that was Jet powered but this latest news about Mr. Jeb Corliss and his wish to fly without a parachute is creepy.

pic credit: New York Times

Site Specific Browsers (SSBs)

Question: What is an SSB (Site Specific Browser)? Answer: An SSB is not your usual browser. It lacks navigation, menus, tabs, and even the address bar! These browsers are designed to work exclusively with a single web application. In other words, you can think of an SSB as a stripped-down version of Firefox. I won’t go in detail about Site Specific Browsers and the idea behind ‘em ’cause this topic has already been discussed by too many awesome people. I’ve been playing with SSBs ever since I created the first SSB bundle for Streamy. The Streamy bundle is meant to work only with WebRunner (now Prism) ’cause currently, WebRunner is the only SSB application that can be installed on Linux, Mac and Windows platforms. Mac also has Fluid, a free SSB application available only for Mac OS X. If you’re a Web 2.0 startup, you should try one of these applications to create a desktop version of your Web application. Since SSBs like WebRunner are open source apps, you can easily modify the code to add additional functionalities.

5 Streamy Invites

Here we go, again! Back in September, I had 5 Streamy private beta invites. I tried to save one but people were asking so nicely that I couldn’t save any invite.

Today I logged in after weeks to check recent changes and was glad to see too many powerful changes in the Streamy platform. The developers are really doing something amazing. I’ve previously discussed about Streamy on this blog and still feel that I wasn’t wrong when I said: “Streamy is the grand daddy of ‘em all feed readers.” I’ve spent my share of time using Google Reader and have recently been using Feed Each Other but Streamy beats ‘em all. If its design isn’t able to attract you, the features certainly will.

Let me know if you need an invite. I’ve 5 invites left.

5 Ethical Ways to Get More StumbleUpon Traffic

Steven Aitchison, one of my StumbleUpon friends and the author of Change Your Thoughts has written a good article on attracting more StumbleUpon traffic. Though I’ve never been much interested in the “increase your blog traffic type articles”, I like the honest points that Steven makes in this article.

Steven writes that every StumbleUpon member likes getting reviewed and once you leave a nice review, there are chances that the person you’ve reviewed will review you back. It has happened 4 or 5 times with me that I left a review and earned a nice review in return. The more reviews you get, the better. But, the main question is: Is reviewing others with the sole purpose to promote your self-submitted content an ethical behavior?

Personally, I won’t do that. Neither will I suggest submitting your own blog links unless you feel you’ve written something that others will really, really like and find useful. Even if you have written a quality article, avoid submitting your own pages to StumbleUpon. Self-promotion is liked under a certain limit and it applies everywhere, be it Digg, reddit or StumbleUpon. I used to submit one or two personal links/week back in March when I actively started using StumbleUpon but stopped doing this pretty soon.

If you really want to attract lots of StumbleUpon traffic, here are the 5 points that have been pretty useful for me:

1. Fresh & Quality Content Discovery
2. Fair and detailed reviews
3. Relevancy
4. Trying to understand what your friends/fans like the most
5. Promote your friends, get promoted

1). Fresh & Quality Content Discovery — Quality content. Submitting any content won’t help. You’ll also have to focus on the quality of the article that you’re submitting. The rule is simple. Support the community in discovering quality articles, the community will automatically support you. Have you ever noticed why there are a few people who have submitted just a few thousand links but have over 5 thousand fans? Do you ever try to notice why there are a few stumblers who have liked more than 100,000 pages and still have only 5 or 6 hundred fans?

Quality, my friend. It’s the quality that matters. Nobody cares about the numbers. The best way to attract more fans is by concentrating your mind on discovering good articles.

2). Fair and detailed reviews — Just hitting the “I like it” button isn’t going to help. If you’ve time, try to leave a review for the article that you’ve just discovered. Just writing something like ‘good article. I like it.’ isn’t going to help either. I’ve come across thousands of such stumblers who leave these type of reviews. Some profile pages are full of “great links. good stumbler” type of posts.

If you want to attract others, you’ll have to write a review that is unique and insightful at the same time. You should leave a review like you leave a comment on any blog, i.e., if your main aim is to attract traffic. If you follow point #1 and #2, you’ll end up attracting lots of fan. It’s guaranteed. Just try these points for a week and you’ll see if I’m right or wrong.

3). Relevancy — Relevancy is the key point. Always avoid adding irrelevant people in your “mutual friends” list because they are not gonna help you in this generate-traffic mission. Always remember that you can make only 200 mutual friends.

4). Trying to understand what your friends/fans like the most — When you realize that you’ve started attracting new fans, you should visit their profiles and spend sometime trying to understand their likes/dislikes. If your interests match, send some high-quality links their way. I’m assuming you already know how to send links to your friends.

Here your main goal should be to make the link popular that you’ve just sent to your friend, even if the article is not from your own blog. How does it help? Well, if your friends really like the article, they’ll leave reviews for sure. 4 or 5 reviews and there is 70% chance that you’ll gain a few new fans.

5). Promote your friends, get promoted — If you find something interesting on your friend’s profile, don’t hesitate adding a link to his/her profile in your review. Something like ‘Discovered@ ABC’s profile‘ will do the job.

If your friend maintains a blog, visit his/her blog, read a few articles and if you find something interesting, submit it to StumbleUpon. Try doing this for a few weeks and you’ll realize that your friend has started doing the same thing for you.

Just try these 5 points for a few weeks if you really want to attract tons of traffic.

Ruby on Rails 2.0 Released

Rails 2.0 has been released with great new features, loads of fixes, and an incredible amount of polish.

Rails 2.0 is finally finished after about a year in the making. This is a fantastic release that�s absolutely stuffed with great new features, loads of fixes, and an incredible amount of polish. We�ve even taken a fair bit of cruft out to make the whole package more coherent and lean.

Internet Explorer is a Damn Virus

.. and every Web designer is aware of this fact. Even after the release of Internet Explorer 7, it’s a big headache for the designers. A few months ago, I decided to stay away from Microsoft products and removed it completely from my hard drive.

I’ve been using Gentoo Linux as my main OS for some time, particularly since I made some changes in Avirb, the WordPress theme that I’m using for this blog. I’ve also Slackware and FreeBSD installed on different partitions but I mostly use Gentoo ’cause of its speed.

Since I didn’t have Internet Explorer installed @ Gentoo, I made the changes and tested it in Firefox and Opera. I know that if a design works in Firefox, it’ll normally work fine in Safari. The pages appear slightly different in Opera and Konqueror, the default Web & file browser for KDE, but that’s not a problem.

A few days ago when I tested my design using Browsershots, a website that allows you to test your web design in different browsers, the current theme looked completely ugly in both Internet Explorer 6.0 and 7.0. You can see that Firefox and Safari render the pages correctly.

If you’re a web designer, you can catch the problem just by taking a look at the snapshots. I had commented out a color code for the anchor tag, instead of completely deleting the hex code. All the other major browsers rendered the pages as intended but Internet Explorer turned it into an ugly design. I’m pretty sure that I’ve lost many potential readers/clients mainly ’cause Internet Explorer still captures quite a big market share.

Finally, feeling helpless, I installed Internet Explorer 6 SP1 @ Gentoo. I’m not happy at all ’cause even when I don’t want to use Microsoft products, Microsoft forces me to use ‘em. It’s like “Use Internet Explorer, You Dope or else lose readers!”