Reading time ~3 minutes

The challenge – java.io.IOException: Server returned HTTP response code: 403 for URL

Remember my post Reading/Parsing RSS and Atom feeds in Java with Rome, remember how I build SyndFeed objects out of a feed’s URL:

public SyndFeed getSyndFeedForUrl(String url) throws MalformedURLException, IOException, IllegalArgumentException, FeedException {

	SyndFeed feed = null;
	InputStream is = null;

	try {

		URLConnection openConnection = new URL(url).openConnection();
		is = new URL(url).openConnection().getInputStream();
		if("gzip".equals(openConnection.getContentEncoding())){
			is = new GZIPInputStream(is);
		}
		InputSource source = new InputSource(is);
		SyndFeedInput input = new SyndFeedInput();
		feed = input.build(source);

	} catch (Exception e){
		LOG.error("Exception occured when building the feed object out of the url", e);
	} finally {
		if( is != null)	is.close();
	}

	return feed;
}
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Reading time ~1 minute 

<head>
<title>Hoisting example</title>
</head>
<body>
    <h1>Hoisting in action</h1>
    <script type="application/javascript">
        var hoisting = "global variable";
        (function(){
            confirm("\"" + hoisting + "\"" + " click OK" );
            var hoisting = "local variable";
            alert(hoisting);
        })(); //self-executing function 

     //Best practice - declare local variables at the beginning of the function 
    </script>
</body>
Reading time ~3 minutes

The challenge

I have been getting complaints from people who were trying to suggest a podcast to Podcastpedia.org, and that for a good reason. They were getting a page with the following message: 

"Unknown error. Please inform us about it with the Error indication form."

This is the default page rendered when an unknown exception occurs. Although this is prettier than displaying the error stacktrace, it should be avoided – it didn’t tell the visitors much and me neither.

Octocat Source code for this post is available on Github - podcastpedia.org is an open source project.

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Reading time ~1 minute

There are to main applications, that power Podcastpedia.org, one that is actually the web application and another one where I do administrative stuff and podcast updates. Experience has shown that if I want to run the podcasts updates in the background and do some testing/debugging/redployment on the front-end application it’s better to have them running on different Tomcat instances on the development machine.

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Reading time ~4 minutes

Every webmaster should know by now, that the <title> of a webpage, is one of the most important factors for ranking in the search results. Not only it is the title of the tab or browser windows, but it’s also the first line people see in the search results, followed by the URL and the snippet(this is usually the content of the <meta name="description"/> combined maybe with a date):

Search results - print screen snippet

Search results – print screen snippet

Octocat Source code for this post is available on Github - podcastpedia.org is an open source project.

You’ve seen in a previous post – SEO: Friendly URL construction with Spring MVC – how to build (search engine) friendly URLs (or permalinks). Well, in this post I will present how to generate dynamic titles and meta descriptions with Tiles on top of a Spring MVC application, which currently powers Podcastpedia.org.

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