Saturday, February 20, 2010

My First Annual Bi-Weekly Tweet Roundup*

My first annual posting of this bi-weekly* period's most exciting tweets by me, sorted in reverse-most-exciting (RME®) order:

The tweet of the link to this blog post:
Long: http://twitter.com/dilbrent/statuses/9415171215
Short: http://dilbrent.com/r/Tweet-Roundup-Tweet

Self-recursive tweet of the announcement of my URL shortening service:
Long: http://twitter.com/dilbrent/statuses/9223294945
Short: http://dilbrent.com/r/3

Tweet regarding my "favoriting" of the tweet about my blog update:
Long: http://twitter.com/dilbrent/statuses/9175354849
Short: http://dilbrent.com/r/Blog-Update-Tweet-Favoriting

Tweet announcing my blog update:
Long: http://twitter.com/dilbrent/statuses/9175138393
Short: http://dilbrent.com/r/Blog-Update-Tweet

* Some of you may have noticed a dichotomy regarding the words "annual" and "bi-weekly," possibly due to the fact that they mean incompatible things, like "up" and "down," or "solid parenting" and "Britney Spears."

Before you question whether I proofread my posts prior to posting (hint: I do not) I should explain that I expect to completely forget to do this again for at least a year. Which, let's be honest, is likely how long it will take for me to accumulate enough tweets of the amazing caliber demonstrated above to merit another tweet roundup.

On an unrelated note, look for a very exciting Google Buzz roundup in the near future. Rumor has it that it may reference some of the Tweets from this post.

Tuesday, February 16, 2010

URL Shortening and your personal security and you

As most of you who follow security chatter are aware, URL shortening services like bit.ly and tinyurl.com are somewhat frowned upon by the security community:
http://dilbrent.com/r/2 [wikipedia.org]

I won't bore you with the tedious details. I'll let the wikipedia article do that.

What's unusual is that despite the general public's universally near-instantaneous adherence to the advice of the security community, URL shorteners are actually gaining in popularity.

To thwart this growing threat I have written my own URL shortener that not only supports a tiny subset of the functionality of the "big name" shortening services, but still provides basically the same fundamental security flaws.

The difference is that, since I wrote it myself, if it suffers from link rot or torrential virus distribution, or is simply not even responding to basic requests, you can rest assured that these issues are safely being managed by me, rather than some faceless conglomerate that cares more about the bottom line than providing a sub-par service.

My tweet announcing my new URL shortener:
http://dilbrent.com/r/3 [twitter.com]

A link-back to this blog post:
http://dilbrent.com/r/unlike-the-big-name-services-the-dilbrent-url-shortening-service-supports-arbitrarily-long-link-urls/ [blogspot.com]

Notice in my previous example that the shortened URL can be as long as you like. Try getting that from bit.ly. I suspect that they will just laugh at you if you ask.

Anyway, to take advantage of this quantum leap forward in URL shortening, simply send me the URL you wish to shorten and the URL extension you would like, and I will let you know when it's up. Please allow 3-5 days for a response.

Monday, February 15, 2010

I have tweeted about updating my blog!

Thanks predominantly to the overwhelmingly positive response to my previous blog post, (thank-you Eric S) I became so emboldened as to decide to tweet about it, via the popular social messaging medium "Twitter."

Here's the tweet:
http://twitter.com/dilbrent/statuses/9175138393

And the meta-tweet (please forgive my vanity):
http://twitter.com/dilbrent/statuses/9175354849

Some of you may be thinking, "hey, it kinda seems like Brent's blog is mostly about Brent writing stuff in his blog, and any actual substance feels, well, somewhat stark or even nonexistent."

My reply: I love your in-your-face honesty, and the way you use colloquialisms like "kinda" and, quite frankly, your overuse of commas in quotations. I've heard your feedback, and I've internalized it. Look for more of this quality post in the future.

I have updated my blog!

Don't let the exclamation mark in the title fool you, this is not simply some sort of punctuation-based hype. I have truly made a change to this blog.

First of all, the splash page has changed completely:
http://www.brenttucker.com/

Second, I made this announcement (that you are reading right now) regarding the fact that the splash page has changed.

In other news, for those of you following my attempt to own the word "irony" the news is quite good. As of this date a Google search for my name (Brent) and the word "ironic" (ironic) now returns the top link to this blog.

The original story is here:
http://dilbrent.blogspot.com/2009/03/my-ironically-circular-irony.html

The Google search is here:
http://www.google.com/search?q=brent+ironic&num=1