April 14th, 2004:

I’m not sure how or why, but there is something claiming to come from *revjim.net*’s server that keeps requesting, over and over, the same image from my photo gallery. It sends no referrer information, and it sends no user agent. I have no clue what it is.

I’ve checked the box for processes that seem odd, and I’ve restarted apache twice now worried that it might have a long running script that continues to access it. It makes no difference.

It hits it about 1 every five minutes or so, sometimes faster, sometimes slower. I uploaded the picture on April 7th. The requests started coming in on April 11th. They haven’t stopped since.

It’s driving me up a wall. Anyone have any idea on how to figure out what this is?

bq. I would like to applaud CNET for their courageous invention of a completely new and incompatible version of RSS. –”Mark Pilgrim”:http://diveintomark.org/archives/2004/04/14/hot-rss

There are a few things that make this even more annoying than it seems on the surface.

The first is that they claim it is RSS. Now, I know that the use of the name “RSS” hasn’t caused those in the past to believe that they should at least try to follow the “rules” of that name, but this is 2004. RSS is a big thing. Lots of people are using (and abusing) it.

Second, is that they obviously know how to generate something that much more closely resembles at least one variant of RSS. They’ve proven it by providing other “RSS feeds” on the same page in a more proper format.

Finally, it would be one thing if it was “Joe’s Shoe Factory” doing this. But this is CNET, come on! These are computer guys. These are technology freaks. This is a technology resource. You think they’d at least know enough to give it a different name.

“Inklog”:http://inklog.net/ has joined forces with “ourCMS”:http://ourcms.sourceforge.net/ (don’t bother looking at either site, as they are both seriously outdated).

“Simon”:http://sourceforge.net/users/simham_uk/, one of ourCMS’s lead developers, and I have been working very closely for the past few weeks and a lot of changes have been made to the ourCMS codebase. Leveraging the existing ourCMS code base, we’ve begun to transform it into everything I had desired Inklog to be.

At this point, it mostly works, but doesn’t have any modules to do anything. In the next week or so, that will no longer be the case. There is still some code cleanup to be done, some issues to work out, and, of course, many modules to write. But the difficult work is now done. I’m very excited at the prospects of finally seeing this design dream come to fruition.

I’m hoping to purchase a domain name, get a working software demo online, and update the website in the near future. Additionally, I’d like to begin using SVN for version management.

As with any open source project, we are actively seeking competent developers who share our design goals. If you’re interested in creating a modular, flexible, PHP and Smarty based, database backed, open source, content management system and framework, you might be interested in looking out ourCMS’s “sourceforge project page”:http://sourceforge.net/projects/ourcms/. As I said before, the website doesn’t do the code justice. Browsing through the “CVS repository”:http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/ourcms/ourcms/ should give you a better idea of where we’re at. The CVS code works, right now, but, will be broken off an on as more code is updated. We’re in heavy development. There’s very little documentation, and what we do have is a bit out of date. However, two active “mailing lists”:http://sourceforge.net/mail/?group_id=49523 (CVS commits, and development list), and one (group discussion list) that I’m hoping will become more active in the near future. The development list is only open to developers on the project to keep the signal to noise ration high. The group list is a good place to introduce yourself and your interest in the project.