The next version of Apple’s server software, codenamed Leopard Server, includes a few new features for the early adopter web crowd and their organizations. Ruby on Rails, podcast production, wikis, blogs, and grid computing are just some of the features built-in to the new server OS. The new features redefine what’s possible away from a Microsoft-centered world of Exchange and Sharepoint, opening new possibilities through a combination of open-source software, industry-standard protocols, and Apple’s friendly interface and design. Small workgroups using Macs or Windows should be able to rack an Xserve and be happy. Web server Leopard server has…
Category Archives: Software
Wall Street Journal launches personal homepage
The Wall Street Journal launched a new personalized homepage with Dow Jones content modules as well as customized content from any RSS feed. The new site uses Yahoo! UI Widgets extensively, the first time I have seen the libraries on a high-profile site. My WSJ does not seem to currently support Atom 1.0 feeds….
Spliced feed networks with ads
Brad Feld blogged yesterday about a new FeedBurner effort to place ads on more feeds through the creation of aggregated feed networks. A single curator selects a few feed URLs to create a mega feed for a topic or musing. FeedBurner sells targeted ads inside of the aggregated feed and its various forms of syndication — HTML, RSS/Atom, JavaScript widget, etc. — on a CPM basis. Who other than FeedBurner gets paid for these ad impressions? It seems like another attempt to mine the seemingly free gold laying on the riverbed named user-generated content. The idea isn’t much different than…
WordPress.com adds paid upgrades
Free blog hosting site WordPress.com introduced its first paid feature this morning, allowing customers access to their CSS for $15 a year per blog. Free members can still access 40 built-in templates for free and customize their image header and sidebar widgets. Payments are processed through PayPal. The site is currently testing custom domain mapping, a likely next upgrade. The combination of custom CSS and domain mapping a la carte upgrades puts Automattic’s WordPress.com in direct competition with Six Apart and its TypePad product currently charging $90 a year for a similar feature set….
Black Hat presentation exposes RSS and Atom risks in the wild
Robert Auger and Caleb Sima of security firm SPI Dymanics gave a 50-minute security briefing on RSS and Atom feed vulnerabilities at yesterday’s Black Hat conference in Las Vegas. Their talk, Zero Day Subscriptions: Using RSS and Atom feeds As Attack Delivery Systems, detailed how many blogging systems and feed aggregators do not block against malicious code insertion by third parties and often run at elevated permission levels on a user’s machine, exposing an entire operating system to a potential scripting attack. I wasn’t there, but News.com summarizes some of the topics covered in the talk. Auger listed Bloglines, RSS…
Google Reader observed namespace data
Mihai from the Google Reader team just posted some interesting data about observed namespaces across all feeds tracked in their system. The namespace data provides information not only about popular ways of expressing data, but also gives insight into blog software market share within a sample such as Google Reader subscriptions. Dublin Core as the top namespace is not too surprising. What jumps out is the number of feeds using the default configuration on a variety of platforms, giving a glance into market share. Blogger – 12% FeedBurner – 4% Windows Live Spaces – 4% LiveJournal – 2.5% Technorati and…
Windows Live Spaces launches
Windows Live Spaces has just launched, tying new social networking features into the blogging service. The new release features an integrated friends module tied into your contacts defined in Messenger and elsewhere, and adds new customization options using Microsoft Gadgets. The new friends integration is the real hotness, allowing users to define their relationships and see more information about the people who matter most. The friends module shows Messenger presence and status messages and adds a “gleam” next to any contact with a recently updated space. Friends lists are browsable within a Spaces web page as well as within that…
Flash 9 and the MySpace effect
Adobe released version 9 of its popular Flash player in June, boasting 10x performance increases and a variety of new video, audio, and security filters. MySpace worked with Adobe on new security settings for Flash embeds on its sites and required its members upgrade to the new plugin version for access to Flash content on the site. The new player release combined with the MySpace required upgrade created a lot of confusion around the future of embedded widgets on MySpace and other popular web properties. I spoke with Emmy Huang, senior product manager of the Flash 9 plugin at…
OpenDarwin shutting down
Mac OS X open-source community site OpenDarwin announced it will shut down in the next couple months. The site was the center of discussion and development of WebKit (the code behind Apple’s Safari browser and Nokia’s Series 60 browser), DarwinPorts, and other projects. It’s too bad the projects will now all disperse, and I can’t help but wonder if the move was influenced by something to be announced at Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference in a few weeks….
Zune blogs powered by TypePad
The two Microsoft blogs discussing the upcoming Zune product suite, Zune Insider and Madison and Pine, are powered by Six Apart’s TypePad blogging software. That’s Apache on Linux using Perl and PostgreSQL. Microsoft is heavily into “dogfooding” everything, from Windows Mobile smartphones to the latest build of Vista. It’s good to see the Xbox team step out and blaze their own path….