Today I have upgraded this weblog to Pivot 1.40.1 which is the very latest version of the pretty neat software that powers this site. I've also take the opportunity to remove the last 9rules related stuff that was still here, the list of links at the bottom right of the pages. I've filled this spot with a tag cloud for the time being. There's a lot more that I'd like to change to this site at some point but I'll probably wait with this until Pivot 2.0 comes out. But... this isn't really what this post is about.

The real reason I felt like I just HAD to upgrade is the fact that this release has a feature that seems to have become a necessity: moderated comments. I've mentioned it before, comment spam has moved into a new, extremely hard to beat direction. It's being entered by real humans instead of (fairly) dumb spamming scripts. While comment spam filters such as Akismet or the various ones I developed a few years ago work reasonably well on comment spam being posted by scripts they're all pretty much useless when it comes to the type of spam I've been receiving lately.

The spammers have apparently resorted to paying people to post their crap all over the internet. The comment spam is hand-crafted and the persons posting it have quickly skimmed through the article in order to be able to post something that reads like a legitimate comment. However, the beef is in the URL(s) which are clearly of a promotional nature. It's not hard to distinguish legitimate bloggers / site owners posting insightful comments leaving a link to their own site from the 'hired spammers'. I'm sure lots of you have experienced the same thing.

Today when I got home after a night without a minute of sleep I was surprised with this awesome picture in my Virb mailbox. My friend Sonny drew it for me and it couldn't have been more appropriate than today because this picture pretty much shows me the past 24 hours. Yesterday and today the fourth EU Yahoo! Hack Day was held and to my astonishment my team was awarded the most awesome 'Best of Show' prize for our hack ^*. I'm stoked! An amazing result because there was some seriously stiff competition with high quality hacks all around.

Hack Day is one of those really great things that get organised at Yahoo. It's basically an innovation contest in which web developers and engineers compete in an attempt to come up with some nice innovation in the narrow timeframe of 24 hours. I think I worked about 22 out of 24 hours which is why I'm pretty damn tired now! But it was totally worth it. We kicked some major ass and grabbed the prize. Ian, Paul and Tamsin you all ROCKED! It was a true pleasure to work with such a kick ass hack team and without you all this would never have been possible.

I guess I'm gonna listen to some tunes on the shiny new iPod Nano I won until I'll probably sleep a large part of the Saturday away...

* As much as I'd like to I can't reveal or showcase our hack on my blog as the results of the hack day are internal to the company. However, read my previous post if you haven't yet. Maybe YOU will win the next one!

P.S: Check out Sonny's stuff! This guy has some badass talent! Thanks for the drawing man!

Today it's been exactly six months ago since I started working for Yahoo! Europe in the London office. I can honestly say this is the best job I've ever had in many ways. Interesting work, lots of fun and an extremely challenging environment make it an absolute joy to go to work every day.

The web development team here at Yahoo! London has the most skilled and passionate people I've ever found in any company. And in addition to that, everyone is always helpful and ready to jump in when another developer is stuck with a problem which results in an environment in which there's a lot to learn. I don't think I've ever learned more stuff in the workplace than I did while working here at Yahoo!.

I landed in an absolutely great team (the EU Frontpage team which deals with all yahoo.com frontpages in Europe) and we're doing extremely interesting things.

The atmosphere is extremely laid back and the London pub culture is sprinkled all over the team. Having an office right in the middle of the pub district helps this as well of course!

Wanna join?

Now here's the good news! If the above sounds interesting to you, we're looking for no less than six new web developers to join this magnificent team! So if you're a passionate web developer with good all round skills then why don't you drop me a line so I can get you in touch with the people dealing with new acquisitions? Here's what we're basically looking for in a web developer:

• Hand coded (X)HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. You should be able to provide evidence of progressive enhancement techniques, clear separation of structure, presentation and behaviour layers in your front-end code, including use of unobtrusive JavaScript.
• Experience with programming in PHP
• Expert knowledge of modern web standards, cross browser-development, client and server side performance optimisation techniques, accessibility and search engine optimisation
• UNIX (BSD/Linux) knowledge and experience with version control systems such as CVS and Subversion
• Experience in developing web applications with rich client interfaces using AJAX, drag and drop, and other DOM Scripting techniques.
• Experience with Web Services

If you can throw in some extra knowledge about internationalisation, XML/XSLT, Perl, Microformats or other web related technologies it would be even better!

So if you're interested in a job as a member of the most amazing web development team in Europe then don't hesitate and let me know about it!

I have just removed the 9rules logo from my website. This means I'm no longer a 9ruler. I did it with a bit of pain in my heart because I feel that this blog owes a lot to the 9rules network. However, the network has changed a lot in the past year and is shifting its focus even more as of now. I received the new revised member agreement to which I had to either agree or leave the network containing the following:

Members spoke out about their displeasure concerning members that they never interact with and never hear from, yet all member entries carry the same weight on 9rules, which is not fair. After talking it out in Clubhouse, we made participating either in the private member area or my.9rules a requirement, part of the membership agreement... If you feel you are contributing by your entries being shown, 9rules is no longer a good fit for you, decline the agreement (or do not respond), remove the leaf from your site and we will remove your site from displaying on 9rules. If you agree but don't have the time to interact or don't feel you should (or don't want to), the participation will become a chore, something you didn't want to do in the first place. It just won't work in the long-term so it would be best to decline now...

Let me be clear - participation in either the new member area or my.9rules is required for all members, requested by members.

Tyme White, 9rules

I have mixed feelings about the whole thing. On one hand I really don't want to leave the network because it's been great to be a member, I met interesting people through it and I've always considered it some sort of 'seal of quality' of which I was quite proud. Things however have changed a lot. It's not just about quality blogging anymore. 9rules now wants more from its members.

After seeing a Twitter from my collegue Dirk Ginader I figured it would be a good thing to join the bandwagon on the International Bloggers' Day for Burma. I find it outrageous and extremely sad that things like the recent events in Burma are still happening in the 21st century. So much for a civilised world...

Free Burma!

tagged: Free Burma