Adam Trachtenberg » blogging

eBay DevCon 2006

Adam Trachtenberg — Sat, 10 Jun 2006 14:07:33 +0000

The eBay DevCon 2006 is on! I’m blogging it over at our team blog. Come by and check it out.

The Economist on “New Media”

Adam Trachtenberg — Tue, 25 Apr 2006 06:59:01 +0000

There I was, peacefully reading The Economist.

I made it through the essay advocating kicking Rummy to the curb. I made it through the piece on Hamas. I thought it was safe to venture into the “SPECIAL REPORT ON NEW MEDIA.”

I was wrong.

It started innocently enough, with a review of Ben and Mina. No surprise finding them here.

But then came the unexpected. Out of the blue.

Hardcore quotations from one Jeremy Zawodny, “a prominent blogger and software engineer at Yahoo!, an internet portal.”

Man am I jealous. That lucky bastard. :)

Another eBay Blog

Adam Trachtenberg — Wed, 21 Dec 2005 07:34:42 +0000

Lots of new eBay blogs popping up in the past few months. I just discovered “Tsunami Alert in the Great Salt Lake“, written by Cindy Purvance, my favorite person in eBay customer support. Go Cindy!

I killed trackbacks

Adam Trachtenberg — Tue, 20 Dec 2005 17:00:28 +0000

I was getting bombarded with fake porno trackbacks, and I couldn’t find a way to get WordPress to shove them in my moderation queue, so I turned them off.

Let me know if you have any problems. I don’t know how to bulk edit existing posts to do this inside WordPress, so I fired up MySQL and manually disabled them via a SQL query. Hopefully, I didn’t break anything.

Blog vs. Link Blog

Adam Trachtenberg — Wed, 31 Aug 2005 17:58:39 +0000

Apparently, I find it much easier to point at other people’s content than to write my own. As a result, I seem to be spamming my blog with external links.

I’m not sure if it’s better to post these in a separate sidebar, aggregated in one daily post, or the current solution. It seems Jeremy has similar issues.

Please let me know what you prefer.

I will continue to aggregate these links in my del.icio.us account, so I guess you could always subscribe to that RSS feed instead.

Foo Camp 2005

Adam Trachtenberg — Fri, 19 Aug 2005 19:47:26 +0000

I am heading to Foo Camp. I’ll be back Sunday afternoon. I will blog what I can and link to others who are blogging.

Link Blog and Other Blog Changes

Adam Trachtenberg — Sun, 07 Aug 2005 17:05:16 +0000

In an attempt to add more non-technical related content to the site, I’ve updated my blog to include a “Link Blog” section. Items in the Link Blog are random links that I’ve found on the web that I either think are interesting or want to remember.

Instead of entering these links directly into WordPress, I’ve jumped onto the de.lico.is bandwagon, and am pulling in my links in via the WordPre.cio.us plug-in.

I must say, I find the whole hacking WordPress process slightly skeezy. I don’t mind editing PHP code by hand, but I don’t know how to cleanly integrate my changes with the main WordPress codebase. I’m afraid if I make too many changes it’ll be impossible to manage WordPress updates in any sensible fashion. For instance, I modified the default theme template and stylesheet, so does this mean I can never pick up new edits to those files unless I repatch them with my customizations? Or do those files never change?

Also, I’m unsure how WordPress handles time zones. Why does it ask me my offset from GMT (i.e. -7 hours) when my offset changes due to daylight savings time? How does it adjust for DST? Does it adjust for DST? Wouldn’t it be better to ask for my time zone?

In unrelated blog news, I found a WP feature to clean up the the URL structure. (Thanks to mod_rewrite for those who care about such things.) Hopefully, this won’t break anything, but it does seem a better way to do this, so I’m giving it a whirl.

As always, feedback is welcome.

Moronic comment spammer

Adam Trachtenberg — Tue, 02 Aug 2005 14:33:48 +0000

Some idiot has a script that’s comment spamming me, but the URL he’s trying to sneak in is “http://RandomlinefromCustomField3″.

Blogging eBay Developers Conference and eBay Live!

Adam Trachtenberg — Fri, 17 Jun 2005 17:14:04 +0000

In an new experiment for eBay, we’re blogging the eBay Developers Conference and eBay Live!.

eBay Live! has always put out a Daily Chatter print newsletter, but apparently daily is too slow for 2005. :)

I know we have over 10 people signed up to blog the Developers Conference, so updates should be fast and furious over the conference WiFi network.

Spammers have found me

Adam Trachtenberg — Tue, 14 Jun 2005 17:44:57 +0000

The spammers have found my new WP site. I have received over 50 bogus “casino” comments in the past day. They’re all being flagged for moderation, so they’re not making it live, but they’re filling up my INBOX with junk.

I hate spammers.