Peace Blogs Added to the Index

I know that Feedster has quite a few "war blogs" regularly being indexed by Feedster  -- I wrote the automatic classification routines for the War Filter but it was unclear to me how many, if any, "peace blogs" were in there.  So via a pointer from Doc, I found Mark Pilgrim's list of Peace Blogs and made sure that all of the ones for which he points out RSS feeds are now indexed by Feedster.  Roughly 1/3 were already being indexed so that's something but I thought it best if they all were. 

Note: I'm not getting into the whole war discussion here at all but I do think it important that a search engine cover both sides of things.

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How in the World Can this be Enforced?

I just don't get this:

Via News.com: The first measure, which was approved by voice vote, says anyone who knowingly uses an innocent-sounding domain name to drive traffic to a sex site could be fined and imprisoned for two to four years.

What this is referring to, of course, is the new legislation by the House of Representatives about domain names and Internet pr0n.  Sure I can understand the infamous case of whitehouse.com being a pr0n site is bad but just do this for me -- define "innocent".  What if the site in question is a person's name?  Is that innocent?  God knows that tons of pr0n sites are based on the person's name.  Or something like marriedcouple.c0m ?  Is that innocent?  Is it legitimate for people that have existing pr0n businesses to put up a page in place of their previous domain name with an explanation and a link to a new domain ?  Should existing real world pr0n businesses like "Abe's Books" be required to change their names?  Heck -- playboy.com sounds innocent if you don't know the context.

Note that I'm neither for or against Internet pr0n.  Its just a fact of life these days and we do still have a constitution.  At least for the time being.

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Feedster and NNTP: RSS

From Martin over at Traumwind comes this tip on how to use Feedster.  Apparently our feeds don't 100% validate even though the popular aggregators (Net News Wire, Ampheta, BottomFeeder, Newsgator and others) do generally accept them.  To make them work in NNTP:RSS, you need to be running the 0.3 version (which he highly recommends) and turn on the "Parse at all costs" option.  This is located under the View Channel option.

Thanks Martin!  Much appreciated.

Note: I'm not saying that this is good that we don't validate.  I don't think it is at all but this is a work around for now until we fix that.  Some of the validation errors are trivial but at least one of the validation errors is actually significant.

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Update: Last Day for PHP-CON Registration Discounts

The folks over at PHP-CON asked me to pass this on to the folks that read this blog.  Apparently the last day for the registration discounts for PHP-CON is today.  After today, the rates go up so keep that in mind.  That was the quick version.  The official version is below, complete with "marketing speak".

TIME'S RUNNING OUT - 24 HOURS LEFT!

You have 24 hours left to lock in EARLY BIRD SAVINGS to PHPCon East 2003.  Early bird pricing ends Monday, March 31, 2003. Don't miss out; register today!

Join us next month at PHPCon East 2003, April 23-25, 2003 at the Park Central New York Hotel, New York, NY. Log on and check out PHPCon East's
tutorial and conference program.

**A Stellar Program**

PHPCon is where serious PHP professionals get together to discuss technology, compare notes, and meet the people changing the industry!
Our program includes the top names in PHP development today including:

• Rasmus Lerdorf, Opening Keynote Speaker and Inventor of PHP
• Zeev Suraski, Closing Keynote Speaker and Co-Founder of Zend
• J. Scott Johnson, Principal, The FuzzyGroup
• Zak Greant, MySQL Community Advocate
• Shane Caraveo, Sr. Developer, Active State, Inc.
• Authors Luke Welling and Laura Thompson, Tangent Technologies
• George Schlossnagle, Principal, OmniTI
• Authors Sterling Hughes, John Coggeshall, and Christian Wenz
• Marco Tabini, Publisher, PHP|Architect

**PHPCon East 2003 Sponsors**

PHPCon East is proud to work with the following sponsors: Linux Magazine, Sams Publishing, Zend, PHP.net, PHP|Architect Magazine, Dr.
Dobb's Journal, New York PHP User Group, Codewalkers, PHPKitchen, PHPClasses, Webifex Magazine, FuzzyBlog, PHPUserGroups.org,
PHPDeveloper, PHP-Edit, PHP-Beginners, PHP-Resource Webring, and Weberdev.com

Hm... Rasmus, Zak, Zeev, Shane and more.  Illustrious company indeed.  Now what the **fsck** is my name doing next to theirs?  ;-)  Seriously, if you do php or are thinking about it, this is a great conference with a) lots to learn b) many interesting people and c) the chance to geek out for 2 to 3 days in the big apple?  How can you go wrong?

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