Comments | lj_nifty: Polymorphic Entries Galore!

g0thm0g in lj_nifty

Polymorphic Entries Galore!

Jul 08, 2005 01:30

Ever wanted your LiveJournal entries to update themselves? Well, if you have a server of your own, you can play around with this code! Otherwise, drool over this entry in my journal. If enough people are interested in this sort of silly thing, I might be interested in setting up a customizable service for anyone ( Read more... )

Comments 27

codesign July 8 2005, 13:29:42 UTC

Seems cool :)
I'll check it later.

But I think it will be better not to use plain text password, but md5-hash.

g0thm0g July 8 2005, 13:33:54 UTC

Notice how it only sends the MD5 hash over the network. I updated the code to not store the password in plaintext in the class, but as it won't be serialized or held in memory, there is little risk of that vector resulting in compromise.

MD5's weakness is another story, but challenge-auth is much more network intensive when you're getting hits like this on a personal server.

spatulistic July 8 2005, 14:01:07 UTC

Wouldn't an even easier thing to do be to just link an image in an entry and see who views it that way?

g0thm0g July 8 2005, 14:20:20 UTC

Beat you to it :)

spatulistic July 8 2005, 17:55:26 UTC

But for a lot of these people who scratch their heads and say "PHP? XML?? WTF?!!!" an image is a lot simpler PLUS it keeps it away from LJ all together.

Intresting anam_uk July 8 2005, 14:24:34 UTC

I've been playng with a script to erase livejournal entries (its based on Nethack's erasing code) I was planning this weekend to usee scheduling on my local machine & hte new tag system to see if I could get entries to automatically degrade over time.

I'm glad to see other people playing with self editing entries even if it is a different approach

philosofialogos July 8 2005, 14:39:51 UTC

Pardon me, but could you give an example of what this code does? I don't understand "update themselves".

rachel_nicole July 8 2005, 14:42:53 UTC

I'm with you.

g0thm0g July 8 2005, 14:50:18 UTC

Maybe if you read the entry and clicked the link that is obviously the example, you would find out! Goody!

rachel_nicole July 8 2005, 14:59:59 UTC

Wow. What a thought.

Thread 10

jillykillroy July 8 2005, 17:24:01 UTC

I think this is pretty neat, but I really don't know enough about coding to implement it.

Then, I threw a hidden image into a post whose src attribute referred it back to this PHP script.

can you explain that further?

I'll take this one... greatbiggary July 8 2005, 17:38:59 UTC

Normally you put a url to an online image as the src (source) of your img tag, and the browser fetches the image and displays it on the page where and how you say. By instead putting in the url of a script on his server, the browser's attempt to call the image actually calls his script, which means any time someone looks at the page with the img tag pointing to his script, the script is fired off, and can gather things like who's asking for it, which I believe is how he's getting the referrer url with which to update the post. Spammers use this technique, too, in html email to get a pingback every time someone views their email - the email attempts to load the image which fires up a script. Their src paths include a unique ID so the script knows which email address is doing the looking. example: img src=someserver/somescript.pl?id=1209fj38hf280109f012h8g3 (or something like that - been awhile since I played in online scripting ( ... )

Re: I'll take this one... jillykillroy July 8 2005, 17:53:10 UTC

wow, awesome, thank you SO much. I got it to work even.

ok, if you have another minute, could you tell me how to get it to actually display an image?

Re: I'll take this one... disjointedmemes July 8 2005, 18:02:57 UTC

You could always have the PHP script spit out an image after it's done doing whatever it does.

Thread 6