Pink and Portable – WD’s Passport goes Pink for October

El Reg has a quick blurb about Western Digital’s Passport portable hard drive.

WD’s Pink Passport
Looks like a nice little unit: 250GB, USB2.0, &c.

As part of Breast Cancer Awareness Month, WD will make a dontation to the National Breast Cancer Foundation for each pink Passport drive sold. Going one step further than most, WD’s donations will continue beyond month’s end – they will continue until February 29.

Pink for October

In support of breast cancer awareness and research, I've turned this site pink.

From http://pinkforoctober.org/:

sites will Go Pink during the month of October to bring attention to Breast Cancer Awareness Month, get people talking about breast cancer, and raise money for research.

But to be clear, raising money isn't the primary purpose of this web event.
The hope is that you turn your site pink (in whatever way works for your site), go out to that World Wide Web thing and educate yourself about the multiple issues related to Breast Cancer, then take that newfound knowledge and tell someone else what you've learned.

Hacking with hKit

I've been using hKit recently for several projects, among them trying to figure out why 's user profiles won't import at Satisfaction. In testing, I found that Technorati profiles also don't import.

I tracked it down to two separate issues:

  1. Technorati uses DoubleClick advertising, which uses document.write() to drop new scripts into the page. This script-within-a-script seems to confuse the w3's tidy proxy and breaks everything.
    I managed to work around this with a big ugly hack in hkit.class.php which attempts to detect the document.write() and fix the damage. It's pretty ugly and probably pretty delicate as well, but it's something.
    Feedback is always welcome: Modified hKit 0.5
  2. Satisfaction uses AJAX to pull the hCard info through a script on their server. The script seems to have the same shortcoming as the Microformatic tool with URLs containing a ?. This one was an easy fix on my end; I updated Rosebleed's profile page to accept the username either from the GET string (profile.php?user=silvermoon82) or from pathinfo (profile.php/silvermoon82). The hCard fetcher works with the new format links, so all is well in the universe.

Social networking updates on Rosebleed

I've been updating the features on [tag]Rosebleed[/tag]. Most of the changes are not immediately visible, but they're nifty:
I've rolled out [tag]microformat[/tag] markup all over the site – user profiles are now [tag]hcard[/tag]-enabled and the friendslist is marked up with [tag]hCard+XFN[/tag].
I also implemented [tag]FOAF[/tag] profiles with autodiscovery, much like that provided by LiveJournal (for a cool FOAF tool, check out the FOAF Explorer).

Still in the works on the SN side is implementing [tag][/tag] for logins and order tracking, and hCard, hCard+XFN and FOAF profile-pulling.

Site Update

Well, I've joined the 21st century and retired my home-rolled site management system.
I've moved the majority of my previous content over to use [tag]WordPress[/tag] 2.2.2 (yes, with proper redirects…), and will be finishing up over the next little while.
The new system has quite a few modernizations: tags, comments, trackback (I've been planning to implement trackbacks for a while, both for here and for ; never got around to it), XFN (in the “blogroll” for now, it will grow), and [tag][/tag] authentication for comments.

* Note WRT OpenID auth: The OpenID plugin I'm using doesn't seem to play well with [tag]ClaimID[/tag] identities – when you post and authenticate at the same time, it works fine. If you try to post when already logged in, something breaks and it goes into an eternal redirect loop.

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