Technorati

Guys, have you ever tried clicking on the green icon on the right sidebar of this page? If you haven't, try it :P By clicking on the icon, you become a fan of this blog on Technorati, which is a good thing.

But unfortunately today I'm not in the mood to say how great Technorati is, as a universal blog rating, or an SEO service. On the contrary, I'm here to whine about it...

The first thing I don't like about Technorati is the rating system itself. It is heavily based on blog reactions, which is never correct - the world wide web isn't just about blogging! And sometimes, the ranking is inconsistent across various pages.

The second problem with Technorati is that the blog information there is very much outdated. I tried pinging a few times a week, but the content is still one hundred days lagged behind. An automated ping script could solve the problem, but there's a better way: just let your visitors ping the blogs for you. Here's the code to include as HTML/Javascript:

<img src="http://www.technorati.com/ping/http://quangntenemy.multiply.com/journal?url=http%3A%2F%2Fquangntenemy.blogspot.com&ip=1" alt="." style="width: 1px; height: 1px;" />

(If Technorati ever gets overflown with pings, it's not my fault, it's their fault for having such a crappy service)

Final thing I would like to mention today, Technorati has a few XSS vulnerabilities that can be found and fixed easily, but no one bothered to take any action. Maybe they should fire some developers, or send them to a basic web security course... If you are a Technorati user, be careful out there, or your Technorati account will get pwned in no time.

My first XSS published

Yeah, finally an XSS bug I found has been published on xssed.com! Actually, after stumbling upon this site in late 2007, I had been submitting quite a few bugs discovered while wandering the wilderness, but this was the first one published so far. I wonder what happened to the others - were they not important enough to be there, or just the admins were too busy to process all the submissions. But anyway, I'll keep submitting bugs I have found - for a better digital world :)

Believe it or not, since I gained "underground" knowledge about internet security, I have been seeing vulnerabilities everywhere. Like in 10 websites I visited, 5 were vulnerable to XSS or SQL injection, 2 had other bugs that surely made them insecure, and 3 had bugs that had been/would be discovered (and exploited) by someone other than me. And most of the time my emails to the webmaster went to /dev/null. Not to mention the fact that only a few webmasters were capable of fixing them the right way.

Now with xssed, hopefully my bug reporting will become more effective. And I wonder if there are any other sites like that where I can submit SQL injection vulnerabilities and other bugs too.