by Chris on 20 December 2009
Senator Stephen Conroy jumped the gun by 107 days, announcing that the Government would table legislation to mandate filtering of RC content hosted outside Australia during the autumn 2010 parliamentary sittings.
Depending on the technology, you can bypass the filter by changing your DNS servers, using an encrypted VPN service, or installing Tor (among other solutions). But some of these workarounds can take up to 60 seconds to set up. And using an encrypted tunnel, like a VPN or Tor, will slow your access while you’re using it.
Thankfully, you can also bypass the proposed mandatory filter more conveniently. Just add ?NoCleanFeed or &NoCleanFeed to the end of the blacklisted URL. If the URL doesn’t already contain a ?, add ?NoCleanFeed to the end. If it does contain a ?, add &NoCleanFeed to the end.
For example, if you try to access www.bannedsite.com/page.htm, but you’re blocked, try accessing www.bannedsite.com/page.htm?NoCleanFeed.
If you want to watch a YouTube video that was deemed too shocking for Australian citizens, like www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMiEagk2qN8, you can just try www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMiEagk2qN8&NoCleanFeed instead.
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by Chris on 17 November 2009
Windows Live Writer (download) is an exceptional tool for blogging. But its most useful feature, WYSIWYG editing, relies on an inelegant mechanism to detect the theme used by your blog.
To detect the theme, Windows Live Writer will publish a skeleton post to your blog, read it and save its theme, and then delete it. Sometimes the post isn’t deleted. Other times, it’s indexed by Google, FeedBurner, or other similar services before it’s deleted.
The result is an Internet littered with Temporary Posts Used For Theme Detection.
Obsessive compulsives like me don’t want these posts associated with their blogs. Thankfully, it turns out that you can write a plugin for WordPress to prevent these posts from ever appearing on your website.
<?php
/*
Plugin Name: Orzeszek Live Writer Helper
Plugin URI: http://www.orzeszek.org/blog/
Version: 1.0
Author: Orzeszek
Author URI: http://www.orzeszek.org/blog/
Description: Prevents the Temporary Post Used For Theme Detection from ever appearing on your blog.
*/
function orz_posts_where($where)
{
if(!is_admin() && strpos($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'],
'Windows Live Writer') === false)
{
if ($where != '')
$where .= ' AND ';
$where .= 'post_title NOT LIKE ' .
'\'Temporary Post Used For % Detection (%)\'';
}
return $where;
}
add_filter('posts_where', 'orz_posts_where');
?>
Create a new text file called orz-live-writer-helper.php. Copy and paste the above code into that text file, and save it.
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