BLOG POSTS

There is nothing wrong with the Sparrow Chat rss feeds. The problem lies with Bloglines. I’ve used Bloglines as my rss reader for years, ever since it became available. In all that time it has never been updated, changed format, or added extra facilities.

I’ve been waiting a week for Bloglines to respond to my emails for technical assistance. Researching the web reveals many others with similar predicaments.

My patience is exhausted. I’ve transferred to the Google reader.^[1] It allows for the importing of all the feeds in Bloglines, has a host of facilities unheard of in Bloglines, and once its simple functions have been understood, it’s a joy to use.

Those readers of Sparrow Chat, suffering from the cursed red exclamation mark alongside its feeds, may wish to consider making the switch to Google, or another reader. Google has no cursed red exclamation marks. Sparrow Chat’s feeds work fine in all the other readers I’ve checked out.

Sorry, Bloglines, but so far as I’m concerned, you’re deader than Sparrow Chat’s feeds on your site.

^{[1] “Google Reader”}

Filed under: Not keeping up with the Jones’s

It looks as though, finally, the nasty viruses have been vanquished. While it was relatively easy to wipe the gobbledygook from the core files, today’s hackers invariably leave themselves a ‘back door’ security hole in the website structure, through which they can reinfect at their leisure. Attempting to locate and plug that hole has been a full time job for the past week.

Success is still not certain. No offending code was discovered, despite a long and fastidious search. However, everything was deleted except the bare bones, and replaced with virginal code, plucked fresh from the convent of St WordPress.

Only time will decide whether the effort has borne fruit, or if the vital snippet of offending code has slipped past my vigilance. Please do not hesitate to contact me if your antivirus sounds an alarm while browsing these pages.

And thanks to all of you who were so quick in your support.

One problem remains to be solved: the Sparrow Chat rss2 feed is not being updated by Bloglines. I’ve emailed their service department, but as yet without response. Those of you who use Bloglines as their rss reader, and who’ve noticed a red exclamation mark after the Sparrow Chat feed, might be advised to switch to the standard feed (https://sparrowchat.com/feed/) by clicking on ‘Add’ at the top of the Bloglines feed page, entering ‘sparrowchat.com’ in the ‘Blog or Feed URL’ box, and selecting the top option on the resulting page. That one is being updated.

There are times I wish I was an evangelical Christian. Then, I could believe in Hell, and take comfort that the evil scumbags who spawn such web-filth will eventually fry there eternally.

Sadly, I don’t.

NOTE: I’ve deleted the paragraph referencing rss feeds as it now appears none of the Sparrow Chat feeds are working via Bloglines. This will be fixed as soon as possible.

Filed under: Sorry, Jesus, I tried but I can’t love them

Apologies to those who’ve tried to access Sparrow Chat in the last few days. Some members of the loathsome scum club of the internet, “Hackers Anonymous”, with nothing better to do with their time than research new ways to infect websites, managed to penetrate the blog’s defenses causing some downtime while I located and removed the offending intrusion.

Hopefully, all is now well, and thoroughly disinfected.

My thanks to WWW for making me aware of the problem.

While every attempt has been made to remove the virus, with hundreds of files to check it’s easy to overlook something. Please inform me at once, by a comment to this post or by email (top of left sidebar), if your anti-virus software reports anything suspicious while browsing Sparrow Chat.

Filed under: Antisocial scumbags