I noticed via a pingback to one of my posts that someone is scraping all of my blog posts, publishing them at netscape9.com, and displaying Adsense ads next to them. I don't know which route I should take first: get their Google Adsense account closed for violating the TOS, contact GoDaddy about the user using the Netscape trademark without permission, or get their hosting shutoff for copyright violations. I think I'll do all three. :-D

Update: The owner of the site offers some clarification.

My restoration of Digg's Top Users page yesterday got a lot of press around the Web:

Both the list and my blog post about the list were submitted to Digg, but both were buried off of the front page. (Buried, or manually removed?)

Michael Arrington mentioned the list at TechCrunch, and the readers commenting on his post inexplicably turned against Netscape. Even though my actions had nothing to do with Netscape, the fact that I write code for them as well apparently makes my reproduction of the list "lame":

"If this would have come from someone NOT at a competitor (in this case Netscape), I would have thought 'cool!' The fact that this comes from someone at Netscape makes me think 'lame!'."

Deep Jive Interests (a personal favorite of mine) was the first to wonder how long it would be until I heard from Digg's infamous legal team. Nothing yet, but I'll blog about anything that comes in.

This blog somehow decided to go with the headline "Netscape Bringing Top Digg Users Page Back." I think if Netscape was sponsoring this effort, they'd want some kind of mention somewhere on the page. What? It only links to Digg? That's awfully strange.

Like many others, Technacular incorrectly reported that I was scraping user profile pages for the rank number that is displayed there; kudos to them, however, for being the only ones to update their post after I sent them a clarification on how the script actually works.

Additionally, my blog was linked from Techmeme, blurbed on Download Squad, and mentioned at ValleyWag.

Oh, and there's one question that I've been asked a few times that I'd like to address here: Sorry ladies, but I'm already taken.

I've updated the Greencode Wordpress theme (which I'm using on my site) to version 0.3. Since version 0.2, I've added a print stylesheet (screenshot of a printed page below), optimized the header image to reduce its size by half, and fixed a few miscellaneous bugs.

You can download the newest version from the Greencode homepage.

Google sees me for who I really am.

After giving it a workout this week with all the visitors to my blog from Digg and StumbleUpon, I've made some changes to the Social Traffic Monitor plugin for Wordpress, and I'm releasing version 1.2.

Since version 1.1, I've added StumbleUpon as a social news/bookmarking source, fixed a few bugs with logging non-social-referring sites, and I've added the option to supply a formatting string for the plugin's output. What this means is that you can now call the plugin like this:

	<php social_traffic('<div>%s</div>'); ?>

and the the plugin will replace the "%s" with its output, but only if it has something to display; otherwise, it will display nothing at all. This allows you to add borders, positioning data, or just your own custom code to the plugin's output. (Calling social_traffic(); is equivalent to calling social_traffic("%s");.)

To upgrade, simply download and unzip version 1.2 and upload the included social-traffic.php to your wp-content/plugins/ directory.

Just got this automated e-mail:

The domain chrisfinke.com has reached 90% of its bandwidth limit for January. Please contact the system admin as soon as possible.

Thanks a lot, Digg! I better lay low for a while... :-)

Welcome, readers of Lifehacker and Download Squad. I hope you find URL Fixer as useful as I do.

Feel free to check out my other extension and software projects, and if you find any of it interesting, go ahead and subscribe to my feed. I typically write about Firefox extensions, my job at Netscape, and other technical items of interest on a semi-daily basis.

I've updated this blog to share a design with my main site. Bonus points to anyone who can determine the sources of the code shown in the header image for either site.

Some interesting Google searches for which my blog is the first result:

it hailed
mandeltastic
the hand strikes and gives a flower
nah na na
comment voting
netscape is my portal to nookie

and from someone who is apparently debating whether to finish high school or drop out and become a gameshow host,

what grade did Howie Mandel complete in school?