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Some light-hearted humor from the guy behind “Dave’s World”
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Merry Christmas to all! I hope you all have a good one and have a drink/smoke/spliff/woman on me!

How does the IOD (Injured on Duty) ambulance driver get to the hospital if he injures himself?

Dammit, Brain Frying………………

Before anyone laughs at the title of this post, let me try to persuade you that this is potentially a great idea.

I myself hate having to check into my bank account to see what movements have taken place. Its time consuming when all I want is a list of all movements since I last checked in as well as balances of my various accounts.

First National Bank provides something like this where they email you any changes to your account or even sms it to you. Banks in the UK offer no such service. So the idea of RSS being used springs to mind. I must credit this idea to Grant though.

Wouldn’t it be great having an RSS aggregator pulling an RSS feed directly from your bank with the latest movements in the XML feed? I think it would. Aside from the security concerns and actual implementation details, this is a good idea.

Unfortunately as RSS is a pull mechanism, this presents us with some major security concerns. No bank in the world is going to publish RSS feeds to anyone without proving that the account is yours. And there is no way currently of authenticating yourself against an RSS feed. Well there is via normal HTTP authentication but banks are going to demand that you authenticate without their digital signatures. And I definitely don’t want to have to continually type my login details over and over. Anyone hear of public/private key pairs?

But if an authentication method was devised, RSS could be vaulted into a new market completely.

I would love to hear comments on this post, so please feel free.

I spent the day at home again today. Slowly recovering the use of my voice and I should be back at work tomorrow. I spent the whole day playing Halo 2. Wow, I never get tired of playing it online. It is amazing! Buy it now.

Thats it. Small post for today because I am tired and want to sleep. Goodnight and keep safe on the inkernet. (Yes I spelt it that way on purpose)

Here is a great tip for podcasters using Wordpress. To be listed in Audio.weblogs.com your RSS feed needs to have the enclosure tag inserted.

To make sure this happens, follow these steps.

1) Create a new wordpress category called “Podcasts” (or whatever you would like)

2) Make sure Permalinks are turned ON. I am using the default permalink structure for my example. Feel free to update yours with your preferences but make sure you change the link below properly.

3) Now use this link for your podcast feed: http://www.yourdomainhere.com/archives/category/podcasts/feed/
This creates a RSS2 feed exclusively for your podcast category. Simple as that, you can get your listeners to subscribe to this feed for only posts on your blog that contain enclosures.

There is a caveat to this though. Currently Wordpress 1.22 does not support enclosures. There is a hack available on the wordpress support site. Click here for the support page. Fortunately the CVS version does support enclosures but no word yet on when this will be released.

Enjoy, and I hope this helps.

I used to have my blog at http://www.rjb.za.net/wordpress/. If anyone visited my site directory to http://www.rjb.za.net/ there was a php script that redirected to /wordpress. This is not very good for spiders to index because I loose points on the redirects. So I decided to move the blog permanently to www.rjb.za.net/. Much moving of files later, this was done.

This worked pefectly except it broke all links in any search engine. This sucked. Big Time. I remembered Grant speaking about mod_rewrite. This is a little module in Apache that allows you to rewrite URLs dynamically. In fact it is used in most Wordpress blogs everyday to use nice clean URL’s for all entries.

The plan I put together was this. Rewrite all URLs for http://www.rjb.za.net/wordpress/$1 to http://www.rjb.za.net/$1 ($1 being variable URLs). As well as this I wanted to tell the browser/spider that the old URL has been permanently moved. This will cause spiders to reindex my page. So I need to include the HTTP code 301 which coincidently is the code for Moved Permanently. So after looking at this great guide on rewriting URLs, this is the code I put in my .htaccess file and causes this wonderful rewrite to happen:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^wordpress/(.+) /$1 [R=301,L]

Sweet and easy, this causes the URLs to be rewritten in the case of looking for the /wordpress directory and tell the browser that it has been moved permanently. Essentially one line of code for this.

Of course all of you already know this and are probably laughing at my solution and saying: “Goddammit, you should have known this already!”. Oh well, learn somtin’ new everyday