Category: The Web Sucks

All-day untimed events in RFC 2445 iCalendar

Timely‘s WordPress Calendar plugin doesn’t interoperate well with RFC 2445 iCalendar feeds that contain all-day untimed events specified by both DTSTART and a DURATION:P1D. Instead of interpreting them as a one-day all-day event, it seems to interpret them as a two-day event. I examined a half-dozen calendar apps to see how they generate these kinds […]

Farewell, htdig

htdig has been retired from radwin.org. Many years ago I set up a site search on radwin.org using a tool called ht://Dig. It was a C/C++ app that would spider/crawl a website and also serve out search results in an HTML-friendly fashion through a CGI. The rest of the world moved onto Lucene/Solr, but I never […]

gzip encoding (mod_deflate) on DreamHost

It took me all of 10 minutes, and I just sped up Hebcal.com by enabling Apache mod_deflate on DreamHost. I used the Google PageSpeed Insights tool to measure the performance of Hebcal, and it complained that we weren’t gzip-compressing HTML, CSS, or JavaScript. Turns out this is not enabled on DreamHost sites by default. What a surprise! So […]

UTF-8.com redesign

I’ve been maintaining a collection of UTF-8 resources at utf-8.com for the past 13 years. I registered the domain name back in 1999 when I began working on internationalization and character sets. After years of looking like I hand-coded the page in Emacs html-mode (which I did), I finally decided to move to a more modern […]

Annual tech refresh: move to WordPress

radwin.org got compromised recently due to some sort of server-side vulnerability. Was it a MovableType bug? Some stale version of phpBB or a vulnerability in the ancient copy of PHP4 itself? Who the heck knows. I did a slash and burn and removed all stale PHP/CGI stuff and upgraded to PHP5. Looks like I got […]