Push recruiting
As I was debugging why feedparser is mangling the GigaOM feed titles, I found this easter egg on the WordPress hosted site:
zephyr ~>telnet gigaom.com 80 Trying 72.232.101.40... Connected to gigaom.com. Escape character is '^]'. GET /feed HTTP/1.0 Host: gigaom.com HTTP/1.0 301 Moved Permanently Vary: Cookie X-hacker: If you're reading this, you should visit automattic.com/jobs and apply to join the fun, mention this header. Location: http://feeds.feedburner.com/ommalik Content-type: text/html; charset=utf-8 Content-Length: 0 Date: Thu, 20 Mar 2008 23:36:17 GMT Server: LiteSpeed Connection: close Connection closed by foreign host.
Knowing how to issue HTTP requests by hand is one of my litmus tests for a web developer, but I had never thought of using it in this creative way as a recruiting tool…