James Slater Archive

Proficient in a number of computer programming languages James has the knowledge and experience to design and build a diverse range of complex web applications that provide our clients with the competitive edge in their markets.

Hidden Services on Google Social Search

I know I’m a bit behind the times with this one, it’s been a few weeks since Google announced changes to the way they integrate social results with normal search results. In the process, they added the ability to publically or privately link your Google profile with accounts on Facebook, Flickr, LinkedIn, Quora, Twitter and [...]

Another Day, Another Twitter Exploit

Apologies to anyone out there who’s not a Twitter fan (e.g. our very own Carps springs to mind), but this is another Twitter exploit post. If you do use Twitter you’ll likely already have seen this one in action today, and if you don’t, you won’t be interested. Oh well. The Problem The actual exploit [...]

Boring Google Cache Bug

Disclaimer: This post is not very interesting. Don’t say I didn’t warn you. With the above in mind: it’s not every day that I (or as far as I know, anyone else) find a visible bug in one of Google’s core products, so I thought I’d share this one with you. You may well have [...]

Another Crazy Twitter Vulnerability

Keep a close eye on who you’re following on Twitter. According to this thread over on Hacker News – you can make anyone you like follow you (virtually speaking!) by simply typing “accept” followed by their username into a new tweet. e.g. “accept DaveNaylor” (without the quotes). Not that I would in any way condone [...]

Why is mi.o2.ie Duplicating Our Content?

Like most things that happen here in the Bronco office, it all started with a SERP: What’s going on there then? A quick investigation of mi.o2.ie shows some badly formatted HTML and an error message about O2′s mobile internet service. Predictably, the domain is listed as belonging to O2 Ireland. So why have they got [...]

Improving Page Load Time

It’s been a good couple of months since I was asked to write a post about reducing the page load times on this blog. In the meantime there’s been a big “will they/won’t they” around Google using page load times as a ranking metric, every man and his dog has blogged about the subject and [...]

Don’t Make The Same Mistakes As Bit.ly and Tr.im

I wrote a post yesterday about the dangers of allowing (some) custom shortened URLs. Really though, I only talked about one particular name on one particular shortener, so I’ll try to make this a little more general. Incidentally, bit.ly appear to have fixed their robots.txt as of a couple of hours ago – they obviously [...]

Dangers of Custom Shortened URLs

If you’re not careful, custom shortened URLs can be dangerous – just like any other user-provided content. As an example I’m going to pick on bit.ly. They’re not the only site to have this problem, but since being chosen as the default URL shortener on Twitter they are probably the highest profile. http://bit.ly/robots.txt Where do [...]

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