This must seem unimportant to many web developers, but for me it 's a major pet peeve. It's the web service that uses a blank user agent. Anyone who runs a blog receives huge amounts of scammers and scrapers trying to harvest information.

A lot of the poorly coded web scrapers fail to include a USER AGENT with their requests. Unfortunately there are still web services that retrieve web sites to digest the data for legitimate reasons that fail to include a USER AGENT. I drop them uniformly on the floor.

The most recent of my encounters with one ...

A web site redesign is usually not newsworthy by itself. As you can probably tell from this site, I'm not the huge eye candy design guy. There was one item though in the redesign of Hong Kong's major over-the-air TV network that caught my eye.

TVB normally posts clips from their Cantonese news broadcasts on the net. They had been posted as .asf files. TVB has now jumped on to the coattails of YouTube and moved to flash video!

So the new template goes live. There will probably be tweaking of the style sheet for items like blockquotes, but the format seems to be working. The style is a 3 column liquid layout with the center block flowing around the bottom of the right sidebar. At the moment, I haven't converted index.php to serve application/xml+xhtml only, but index2.php does a browser detection to serve application/xml+xhtml to non-broken browsers. text/html is served to Windows IE6.

At the moment the markup is clean enough that browsers don't fail to render index2.php ...