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An astute user helped me uncover a problem in Frassle today. Unfortunately, the problem was that frassle made registration email addresses public by default, and spammers were harvesting these addresses. If you signed up for frassle, your email address may have been read by spammers. This has been fixed for the future but some addresses may have already been leaked.

The problem was that frassle published <managingEditor> and <webmaster> elements in its RSS feeds. These elements are required by the RSS 2.0 spec to contain email addresses, and frassle used your registration email address as the initial value for these. So your email address became public by default… whoops.

This was due to my negligence and I'm sorry if I've contributed to your spam problem. Since Derik emailed me, I've changed the RSS generation so that these two elements are omitted. The RSS feed should no longer disclose your email address, and I don't believe this information is disclosed anywhere else in the system. Derik also commented that he'll be changing his blog post, "Frassle Sells Your Email" (update: now "The Dangers of Email Addresses in RSS Feeds"), to clarify that this is a mistake that's been corrected. I stand by my promise to never sell your email address or personal information.

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Google's Blogger.com has implemented autosave for posts, using a cookie-based approach just like frassle's. Their announcement also has an update that mentions they've disabled autosave because it causes an annoying problem for some users. I wonder if this is the same issue some frassle users have reported, where they are always prompted to restore a post—even if it was successfully posted? I still haven't figured out what's going on there… do any readers suffer from this problem?

(Perhaps it only happens when you edit? I just got it on editing this post.)

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Yesterday I received my sample copy of Esther Dyson's Release 1.0 Newsletter. This issue is about tagging and folksonomies, and was written by David Weinberger; he interviewed me and produced a few paragraphs about frassle in the context of a 20-page survey of organizational systems through time, from trees through tags.

David has kindly shared some of the text on his website. If you're made of money you can buy the issue or a (gulp) subscription, but who am I kidding: why don't you just ask me or Josh if you can borrow our complimentary issue.

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Frassle alpha 9a: Consider it a bit of de-whoops-ification.

I fixed a few bugs over the weekend. While deploying the new version, I noticed that some studio pages didn't work. (The web server was crashing shortly after serving my page.) In the course of investigating that I upgraded some software, rebooted, and… the machine didn't come back up.

Thanks to the technicians at my hosting provider, that got sorted out this morning. It was a minor network configuration issue — the name for my machine in /etc/hosts didn't match the name in /etc/sysconfig/network. It was a big scare (shit; what if the machine died? when was my last backup?) but luckily it turned out to be relatively simple.

Regarding the original problem that caused crashing, I haven't fixed it, but I disabled the category tree widget which seemed to be the source. So if you use that in your studio pages it will simply not show up for now.

Frassle alpha 9 was placed into production last night. It contains a number of enhancements, including:

• fully redesigned frassle content studio (replaces publisher), including:
  - themable dynamic pages
  - interactive stream editor: lets you construct complex content queries without so much as typing a parenthesis
  - programmatic widgets: blogroll, category tree, and more
• autosave in post editor
• minor interface improvements to aggregator
• numerous bug fixes and performance improvements

Does anyone else experience j's bug? I'm not able to replicate it. j—what browser are you using? Does it happen in other browsers too?
Correction: I can replicate this. I'll take a look at it later today. I thought I had it fixed… sigh.

I meant to release alpha 9 tonight, but it's not going to happen. I found and fixed a couple of simple bugs, but then I found a much tougher one. I wouldn't normally hold things up for a bug like this, but since it affects studio pages created automatically when a user registers, I think it would be very confusing to new users.

Also, I tried to fix my computer with the fried motherboard and it looks like it was actually the power supply. Anyone need an Athlon motherboard for cheap?

I finally figured out how to make the aggregator work efficiently enough again! While I was at it, I fixed another thing. Josh fixed something too. So now frassle has functioning:

• aggregator
• statistics for your weblog
• pagination of your weblog (mine has 742 posts as of before this writing)

Hooray!

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Hackers of the world: try our code, fix our bugs!

This Thursday at 7pm at the Berkman Blog meeting at Harvard in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Josh and I will be presenting a test run of our presentation on frassle. The presentation develops a sociological and technological understanding of how blogs facilitate the construction of shared meaning and trust, and explores how technology might be used to advance the utility and scale of these benefits. We call these phenomena Interpersonal Content Management. Then we demonstrate our own prototype Interpersonal Content Management System, frassle.

Everyone is welcome to attend. It should be entertaining and we hope you'll be able to come and offer us some feedback before our presentation a week later at OSCOM 4 in Zurich.