Defeating the DiggBar…

I ran into this little snippet at Daring Fireball:

Last week Digg released something they call the DiggBar, which serves as both a new interface for Digg and doubles as a URL shortening service. The way it works is that you just add “digg.com/” at the beginning of any URL, and Digg creates a short URL in the form of digg.com/1234. Here’s an example DiggBar URL that points to google.com: http://digg.com/d1nYVs. Further, the Digg homepage now links to these DiggBar URLs rather than linking directly to other web sites.

But unlike normal URL shortening services, when you load these Digg URLs, rather than redirect you to the original URL, Digg loads a page which frames the content of the original site. As a user, what you see is that the URL in your browser’s location field remains digg.com/1234, and the content of the destination site loads underneath a Digg-branded toolbar.

Obviously, this is a problem.

I’ve gone ahead and implemented Daring Fireball’s 3 lines of PHP code on my site here. You can see my results: http://digg.com/u1j0Z

Begone, DiggNation.

UPDATE: Apparently, Digg has not set up the diggBar so that Digg doesn’t show up as the HTTP_REFERER. Therefore, I’ve had to unleash the nuclear option and added some javascript to block all framing whatsoever. Not really what I wanted to do, but until I come up with another solution, it will have to do.

Zombie Attack!

Corvus over at Man Bytes Blog has issued the following meme discussion:

You are in a mall when the zombies attack. You have:

1. one weapon.
2. one song blasting on the speakers.
3. one famous person to fight alongside you

This is so easy.

1. The trusty Halberd. Corvus’s shovel is definitely a good choice, but I think I want something a little longer, and a little sharper.

2. “Doomsday Clock” by Smashing Pumpkins.

3. The Rock. Seems like a nice guy, and I think he could be trusted to watch my back and hold his own against the zombies.

(I admit that this is kind of cheating for me. I’ve read World War Z.)

Still alive

For those that are wondering, I’m still here. Just upgraded to WordPress 2.5 which is pretty hawt.

I’m still writing over at Aeropause.com for those that are wondering. I also co-host a podcast over at talkingaboutgames.com. It’s called the Post Game Report and is a podcast that reports on community goings-ons over at talkingaboutgames.com

Been pretty busy, I guess.

Excuse the dust…

I decided to upgrade my WordPress to 2.2. Boy, was that a mistake. NONE of the themes I had customized are compatible with 2.2, it seems, so I’m stuck with this generic-looking crapfest until I get around to cobbling something else together.

Ch-Ch-Changes

I have decided to join forces with Aeropause.com as a staff writer. I probably won’t be updating here as much as a result, and it also means that my video game related posts will almost exclusively be posted at Aeropause.com for the time being, and posts here will probably be at a more personal level now.

I won’t be gone, I’ll just be… you know… posting over there, now.

E3 is here. And so forth…

I love E3. I hate not being at E3.

I love reading news on E3. I hate blogging about E3.

I hate blogging about E3 because I feel like there is little that I can contribute towards the E3 zeitgeist. Maybe that is my own lack of confidence in my ability to write something interesting when every other blog seems to sum up my feelings on various E3 happenings pretty well.

Hmm. I dunno. If I were actually at E3, then perhaps I’d feel like I had something more to contribute.

Which makes me want to be at E3 that much more.

Anywho, this week is E3. Let’s see what happens.

My Bloglines widget

I have created a simple WordPress widget to display my own Bloglines subscriptions. Feel free to download it and use it on your own blog. It has a simple configuration form so that you can set the widget title and enter your Bloglines username.

If you aren’t familiar with WordPress or Widgets, WordPress is the content management software I use to display all of our wonderful weblog posts. A widget is a kind of “plugin-within-a-plugin” that allows me to quickly customize the content of my sidebar.

Download: My Bloglines widget

Also, if anyone has any bugs and/or feedback about this widget, please send me some email at finster [at] gmail [dot] com and please include “Bloglines Widget” in the subject.

TopOfCool.com On The Road

I haven’t really taken this whole blogging thing seriously. I mean, I see guys like the dudes over at damnedmachines.com going to E3; Brinstar at acidforblood.net went to the GDC.

I am obviously not really into this whole thing unless I, too, am attending trade shows and getting inundated with marketing gewgaws.

So, to help myself overcome this lack of in-depth… schmoozing… I am going to set a goal to attend one of these events next year:

• E3
• GDC
• Sandbox Symposium

That’s all I can think of at the moment. There might be some random Microsoft-sponsored events that might be worth attending as well. I think there is some big DirectX conference for game developers that Microsoft runs in Vegas. That might be interesting.

Anyway, this stuff gives me something to save my money for.

My Home is a Supercomputer

This is just a filler post to push Peter Moore’s picture further down the page. It makes me feel weird when I pull up the site and see him glaring at me like that…

I realized today that I have more computing power in my living room (measure in FLOPS) than the most powerful computer in the world had in 1997.

Between the Xbox 360 my laptop, and my old modded Xbox, I think I should have more than the 1.338 TFLOPS that the Intel ASCI Red/9152 was capable of at Sandia National Labs.

That’s crazy.

I upgraded and all I got was this stupid weblog

I upgraded my backend to the new MovableType 3.2. It’s pretty slick, I must say. They’ve integrated some of the more popular plugins, and everything seems to be a bit more user-friendly. If you’re used to MT3 then things will look pretty familiar with this version, and there are quite a few new features. I’m still thinking about moving to WordPress, however. We’ll see how this goes.

The upgrade process itself was completely painless. Of course, this was only because my backup policy is set somewhere between paranoid and practical. That way, when I stupidly delete a config file, I don’t have to completely start from scratch.