Jesse Ruderman

Bugfix for "Blogidate XML well-formedness"

The blogidate XML well-formedness bookmarklet now works for XML that is longer than several kilobytes. Previously, if it found an error in long XML, it wouldn't highlight the error or tell you what line it was on, and gave an error message instead. The fix was to add a Node.normalize() call before trying to extract the text of the error page generated by Firefox.

I primarily use this bookmarklet to help keep my blogs valid, but it also saves me time by catching errors that cause bad rendering in real browsers, such as forgetting to close a <strong>.

Original post about the bookmarklet

Clever blogspammer

A spammer posted the following comment on my old blog post Chrome URLs in Mozilla and Mozilla Firebird yesterday:

I've been a long time user of both IE and Netscape. Now I'm using Mozilla and Firebird. Although I'm a fan of Mozilla and Firebird and have recommended it to friends.

The poster's URL had a spammy-looking domain name ("success-biz-replica"), but the site itself didn't look too spammy and the comment seemed fairly on-topic, so I didn't delete the comment. But today I stumbled on a very similar comment here and realized the comments were spam. The spammer probably decided to spam blogs mentioning Mozilla because those blogs are likely to have high Google PageRank.

I went into my web server logs to see what search phrase she used. I figured it would be something like mozilla "post a comment" "remember personal info" but I wanted to see the exact search phrase. I searched for the poster's IP address and found this:

193.230.197.6 - - [26/Oct/2003:11:07:05 -0800] "GET /archives/000007.html HTTP/1.0" 200 12252 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; Alexa Toolbar)"

There was no referer, which probably just means she hid the referer intentionally. But I noticed something else: she used Internet Explorer to post the comment.

I deleted the comment.

Blogidate XML well-formedness

In a comment on my previous blog post, Simon Willison writes: "I'm not too keen on popping up a new window with an external validation service. How about an alternative bookmarklet that just validates XML well-formedness (essential for those of us who use XHTML)?"

Try the new blogidate well-formedness bookmarklet. If this bookmarklet finds an error, it turns the textarea red, selects the part of the textarea where the error is, and puts the error message in the status bar (not in a dialog). If it doesn't find an error, it turns the textarea green.

Update Jan 21, 2005: added a normalize() call so the bookmarklet won't fail when the XML is more than a few kilobytes.

Blogidate bookmarklet: 1-click blog post validation

"Blogidate" is a new bookmarklet that lets you validate the HTML in a blog post before posting it. It works in Mozilla but not in IE or Opera. To use it, choose the version that matches your blog's doctype and drag it to your bookmarks toolbar.

• blogidate html4.01 transitional
• blogidate html4.01 strict
• blogidate xhtml1 transitional
• blogidate xhtml1 strict

Here's a textarea so you can test the bookmarklet on this page: