Lee Kelleher’s Weblog

Since I started using the Operator Firefox extension a couple of week ago, I’ve found it to be a useful tool - to quickly access microformatted content; such as Contact details and Tagspaces.

Whilst I was testing it out on ReadySteadyBook, I noticed that the only tagspace was “Blog.aspx“, which seemed a bit weird. When I found the same problem on other websites, such as Amazon (example here) where the tagspace was “ref=tag_dpp_cust_itdp_t“. I thought this was a bug, so I raised a ticket on Bugzilla.

… however, I was wrong! Michael Kaply (the Operator developer) pointed me towards the Tagspaces spec.

It seems that for a rel-tag to be recognised as a tagspace it needs to have a specific URI structure:

Tags are embedded in HTTP URIs in a well-defined manner so that the tag embedded in an HTTP URI can be mechanically extracted from that URI. Specifically, the last segment of the path portion of the URI (after the final “/” character) contains the tag value. For example, the URI: http://www.example.com/tags/foo contains the tag “foo”.

This causes an issue for me. On ReadySteadyBook, the site is built using ASP.NET (1.1) on a shared web hosting environment. This means that I have no control over how the web-server (IIS) handles the page requests. For legacy reasons, IIS is configured to only map URI that have ASP.NET extensions (e.g. .aspx, .ascx, .ashx, .asmx, etc) to handled by the .NET Framework. So any “fancy permalinks” that I want to use must have one of those extensions.

At present, an example of a tagspace on ReadySteadyBook is: http://www.readysteadybook.com/Blog.aspx?tag=poetry

(The “Blog.aspx” page is quite complex, it can take all sorts of parameter to filter out it’s content - hence my reason to use the querystring)

Even if I did pretty up the URI structure to not use the querystring, at most I could get it to this: http://www.readysteadybook.com/blog/tag/poetry.aspx

Unfortunately, that still wouldn’t pass the grade with the “Masters of the Microformats”! As the tag would be defined as “poetry.aspx“, rather than “poetry“. See my dilemma?

Should I keep the rel-tag attribute on my tag links? or remove them because it conflicts with the current version of the rel-tag specification? (For other issues with the rel-tag spec, go here.)

Alternatively, I could link them to an external tagspace, such as Technorati? <snarky>oooh, they’d like that wouldn’t they!?!</snarky> A list of external tagspaces can be found here.

Earlier this week I’d heard that Bookninja had been hijacked, they needed some help to get their WordPress back in working order. Mark suggested that I offered my services, so I did.

George explained what the problems since the hijack:

1. Unable to publish blog posts and pages; (a blank page appeared when he tried to publish)
2. All the pages had been delete, or disappeared.
3. Akismet was turned off… opening the floodgates to lots of unwanted casino and porn comment spam!

Previously, Bookninja was running an earlier version of WordPress - one that had a known exploit/vulnerability - so George quickly upgraded to the latest version. (This is all beside the point now).

George sorted out the comment spam and got Askimet back up and running.

The blank page after publishing took a while to figure out, but I got there in the end! (It was a rogue URL in the notification/ping-list).

With the mysteriously vanishing pages (as opposed to posts), my initial reaction was that they had been deleted from the database. I was about to break the bad news to George, but I thought I’d take a quick look at the database to make doubly-sure.

Low-and-behold, I found them! But something weird had happened… All the WordPress pages had been converted into blog posts! This caused an issue because the permalink structure was using “?page_id=” querystring - which meant that all the page links would be broken.

I needed to find a way of bulk converting them back to proper “pages”. Good old Google pointed me towards a blog post by Jesse Caulfield that had a bit of SQL that would Convert a Post to Page.

I adapted the SQL to fit my needs:

UPDATE wp_posts SET post_type = "page" WHERE guid LIKE "%?page_id=%";

With that, Bookninja was back to normal… George has dubbed me “The Bookninja Messiah“! [Cue: Monty Python gag]

Now the hunt is on for the hijacker!

I’ve been noticing a lot of strange requests in theweb logs for ReadySteadyBook, (which result in 404 errors). Never really thought much of them, but I came across Roger Johansson’s blog posting about 404 oddities. So I thought I’d share some of the one’s I found on RSB.

A few of them are the same as Roger found: /robotsxx.txt; /MSOffice/cltreq.asp; /_vti_bin/owssvr.dll

Read the rest of this entry »

Firstly, congratulations to Mark and ReadySteadyBook on getting an honorable mention in The Observer’s Top 50 Players in the World of Books. Judging by the order of names, Mark is in fact the 51st Most Important Person in Publishing!

Mark Thwaite, founder and editor of www.readysteadybook.com, the UK’s largest independent literary website. A librarian by trade, Thwaite writes a regular blog attracting up to 3,000 visitors per day.

There is still a lot of work to be done on ReadySteadyBook - and this recognition from The Observer is a great reward, proving that all our hard work is starting to pay off. The eyes of the publishing world are starting to take notice!

oh, and thanks to Ross for the hat-tip!