I just received an e-mail with the subject line “Shock and Awe.” Turns out, it’s unsolicited spam advertising a gross-out porn site called freakview.com. Spammers seem to be adjusting to wartime nicely.

The current CNN.com homepage was begging to be remixed… Decapitation Attack!

You know blogging has hit the big time when your mom starts a weblog. Unlike most new webloggers though, she’s already found a confident and compelling voice. Highly recommended, even though I’m a little biased.

eBay offers the option of e-mailing new results of saved searches, but they’re very sporadic and incomplete. Instead, I whipped up a PHP script that queries eBay for a set of keywords and converts it to an RSS feed for syndication, allowing you to subscribe to recent eBay search results ordered by date or high bids. The code is here. (Just rename it to ebayrss.php and drop it somewhere on your own webserver.)

You can test it out for a short time on my server, but this is a very temporary demonstration. Please don’t abuse it.

By the way, I don’t see why developers should have to pay the ridiculous fees for the eBay API, especially when augmenting eBay’s own broken functionality and developing free software that makes them money.

July 8, 2003: eBay removed the Javascript array that I was parsing to gather the auction data… I don’t have the time to modify the script, but please feel free to e-mail me a patch, and I’ll post it here.

December 28, 2003: The script is fixed, but eBay may eventually break it again. It’s broken again.

April 12, 2004: This script is no longer maintained. I recommend FreeBiddingTools.com, which hosts RSS feeds for eBay searches.

August 19, 2004: RSS Auction is a new site that does the same thing, in a much more flexible way. Go use it.

“Beat it, Waxy!” — Homer Simpson, Episode EABF09, aired March 9, 2003