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My creative act of the day: New Blog submission form

By: Qwaider

On:Thursday, November 19, 2009 10:15:19 AM
In:Thoughts
Viewed: (4904) times

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Rated 4.5/5 stars (86 votes cast) Thanks for your vote!

Actually, two acts today...

First, I decided I'm going to revamp QwaiderPlanet's Blog submission form. For years, the default Contact Form has been doing a fantastic job. Allowing me to know about new blogs, either from owners, or through referral. I thank you all for the wonderful suggestions you made.

The job turned out to be more than I bargained for. You see, the server application I use is quite complicated. It would have taken me 20 minutes to create a form like that from scratch. But I needed it to integrate tightly with the server. So I had to basically reverse engineer many parts to finally achieve the goal.

I'm proud to say that now, the new form is up and running, and now has fields for Name, Email, blog link and Twitter ID for those who use twitter.

My second act, which I finished last night is...

Controlled redirected RSS feed. I know, it's a mouthful. But the idea here is simple. Say, KJ's blog gets hacked (just hypothetically). If the new site is spreading bad content, and I happen to point to it. I would be putting my readers in harms way.

So to resolve the problem, all the links in the feed now point back to a service that will redirect them ONLY if that target is ok to go to. EVEN if they got the link from the RSS feed a while ago and didn't update it...

Neat ... no? Protecting users retroactively...