Creating a blog on Google Blogger

This will be an ongoing post describing my attempts at setting up a Blogger hosted blog site, the results of which is this very blog.

Removing Redirects

...i.e. peace-out eval()

Many free templates I've seen come pre-built with automatic redirect scripts. To a member of the opensource community this reeks of malware. Imagine using the Apache HTTP client only to find secret network calls to a third party. Unacceptable! The majority of these automatic redirect scripts leverage Javascripts eval() function.

To me, eval() is typically a hack for proper software engineering. It's primary purpose these days is to obscure (code injection), as is used by these free templates. I find that using eval() contrasts with well designed solutions because it allows for code execution without semantic meaning. The code that is being eval'd is begging for an abstraction that represents in higher-level terms what it is doing.

Remove unnecessary eval() calls from your template, especially those that are preceded with a cryptic byte array (that's where they've sneakily hidden their site's URL).