Something about RSS [RSS news and comments]

FileSystemObject bug:

Try this ASP code:

<%
Dim fs
Set fs=Server.CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
Response.Write fs.FileExists(Server.MapPath("COM1.jpg"))
Set fs=Nothing
%>

Even if there is no COM1.jpg will display True.

RSS

It was strange that this blog didn't have a RSS feed but it was true. Now that Blogger.com offers Atom syndication I searched a simple solution to use it for generating my RSS feed. Finally, I found atom03-to-rss stylesheet (licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License). Thanks Aaron. It uses another library XSLT Standard Library (LGPL license).

So, finally, my blog has a RSS feed (I hope not too buggy).

Free online antivirus

Speaking about virus, you may find interesting these links with free online scanners:

• Trend Micro
  
• Panda ActiveScan
  
• RAV
  
• BitDefender
  

Virus

A new virus in town: MyDoom, Novarg, Mimail or however you want. Everybody is talking about it:

• News.com
  
• Symantec.com
  
• F-Secure
  
• Reuters
  
• eWEEK
  
• vnunet
  

.. and many others.

Some interesting comments about it are here ("Finally, a worthwhile virus!!").

Have you got it? Read your emails again :))

My Yahoo RSS

Yahoo Launches RSS Aggregator Beta (eWEEK).

Or see directly Introducing RSS Headlines for My Yahoo! (BETA).

Spyware

A few days ago I saw some strange links in pages I visited. There were some new links for specific keywords, as books, mortgage, weight loss, etc. And on the status bar (IE 6.0) there were some hints: "goto: books". When clicking these links you are redirected to some domains as 0-2u.com or others.

These are results of a spyware program called winlink located in "C:\Documents and Settings\[account_name]\Application Data\winlink\winlink.dll". It's very easy to eliminate it. First you can use regsvr32 to clean the registry. In Run window try:

regsvr32 /u "C:\Documents and Settings\[account_name]\Application Data\winlink\winlink.dll"

Then maybe you have to restart because the dll is loaded in memory. After this you can delete the file.

phpBB enhancement

I think everybody knows what is phpBB. They are missing some of the most important things used by search engines to index the pages: title, meta descriptions & keywords (at least for the version I have). It's very easy to change this. Just open templates/[template_name]/overall_header.tpl and change it to:

...
<title>{SITENAME} :: {PAGE_TITLE} [... more description here ...]</title>
<meta name="keywords" content="... all your keywords ... ">
<meta name="description" content="{SITENAME} :: {PAGE_TITLE} [... more description here ...]">
...

This way each page will have its own description (page title) which will help seach engines when your site is indexed.

Netcraft stats

Do you know Netcraft stats? They have very interesting information. For instance, do you know which are the most used web servers? See this page:

Apache: 31,040,922 [67.38%]
Microsoft IIS: 9,675,979 [21.00%]

As you can see there are more than 3 Apache servers of each MS IIS. It could be the same to PHP compared with ASP ? Maybe.

RSS Readers

I've just added a new page with RSS readers links. What are RSS feeds without readers? :)
If you have other suggestions please let me know.

DMOZ

Good news! 2RSS.com is listed in DMOZ.org. The full path is:

http://dmoz.org/Reference/Libraries/ Library_and_Information_Science/Technical_Services/Cataloguing/ Metadata/RDF/Applications/RSS/Directories/

So far I tried to add a few sites to DMOZ without success. But after this experience I could start thinking that something is still working at DMOZ. However, would be much better if we'll get some feedback from DMOZ, both from successful or unsuccessful additions.

Older Windows

Some interesting news from MS - they decided to extend support for older Windows (98 / 98 SE / ME). I always thought that many companies are still running Win 9x but I didn't saw any statistics. In this article there is a number for Win 9x users: 20% (according to International Data Corp). In other article you can find other numbers: 58 million Windows 98 users + 21 million Windows 95 users. Do you think these users could be ignored?

After almost a month of silence I'm back with new topics. Today, I have something to say about:

Yahoo groups RSS feeds

Did you know that you can get Yahoo groups messages as RSS feeds ? For two well known groups (rss-dev & syndication) you can try :

- http://groups.yahoo.com/group/rss-dev/messages?rss=10
- http://groups.yahoo.com/group/syndication/messages?rss=10

Of course, numeric value says how many messages to include.
This way you can syndicate any Yahoo group.