Chad's News

Today marks the 5-year anniversary of the very first Chad’s News post. We made 1217 posts over those 1826 days.

Due to a major security problem in older versions of WordPress, the software behind Chad’s News, I have finally updated from the very old 2.0.* branch to the latest version, 2.8.4. The site appears to be working correctly, but if you see any problems, please let me know.

We’ve made some changes to our mobile device support here at Chad’s News. Previously we used a free service to do the conversion, but they append advertisements to the website—some of which are not safe for work. So our crack team of web developers jumped into action and wrote a new style sheet for mobile devices. If you’ve got an internet-enabled phone, direct your browser to chadsnews.com and check it out. Any comments or suggestions are appreciated.

Here at the Chad’s News network command center, we’re always exploiting new technology in our never-ending quest to serve up interesting content. So we now have a version of the site formatted for mobile devices. Mobile users are automatically detected and redirected to the alternate site (via mofuse).

Try it out and let me know how it works.

Due to changes at FeedBurner, the official URL for the Chad’s News RSS feed has changed. Here is the new address:

http://feeds2.feedburner.com/ChadsNews

The old feed will continue to work indefinitely, but you may want to update anyway.

A recent post containing a significant error (“No More Seller Feedback on eBay”) was published to the Chad’s News RSS feed before I could correct it. The post has been updated, and I recommend you read it here.

Chad’s News has moved to a new domain: www.chadsnews.com. The link structure is the same—should you wish to access a story from an old link, simply replace

www.cloman.com/chad/ChadsNews

with

www.chadsnews.com

I’ve been using blogger.com for some time now, but it’s become increasingly unreliable. So over the last few weeks I’ve been porting Chad’s News to WordPress, and I made the official switch tonight. There are new features, such as categories, as well as a much better search function. I’ve tried to make it as transparent as possible, but old links may not work. If you catch any problems, please let me know.

Having just switched to bloglines I was pleasantly surprised to see two subscribers to Chad’s News. But as I dug further, I found that the bloglines experience was not as good as expected.

First and foremost, the title link for each entry is modified by bloglines, and returns a 404 error. I’ve checked the raw feed, and it is not my fault—bloglines is the culprit. I just finished sending them feedback, and hopefully they will fix this soon.

Second, I make liberal use of the <dfn> HTML tag when using words that may require definitions. I use javascript to open the definition in another window, but bloglines strips the javascript, thus making the definition useless. For future entries, I will use a non-javascript method (like this). Also, <dfn>’d words are in italics (I have some really neat formatting for them, but it’s in the CSS style rules and doesn’t get included in the RSS feed—and bloglines strips out style information anyway.).

Thanks for subscribing to Chad’s News, and feel free to contact me with any comments.

I’ve added a search feature to the blog. It performs a Google search of the Chad’s News site, which will be quite useful when you want to look up something dimly remembered from months past.

Due to popular demand, I have enabled comments. Should you wish to expound on one of the topics, feel free to do so. I’ll receive an email whenever a comment is posted, so you can be sure it’ll get noticed.

Currently anyone in the world can comment anonymously. If you’d like your name to be associated with the comment, then register at blogger.com. If you decide to register, let me know and I’ll officially add you as a member of the blog. (Currently membership has no privileges, but that could change in the future.) Note also that blogger.com is owned and operated by Google—and that other accounts you have with Google may transfer into blogger.com (it did for me).

Take care, and enjoy the site!