A few weeks back I got this call from an Indian outsourcing company about a job at BusinessWeek. It was a temp job to develop their new blog. Their hiring pitch starting with the requirement that the person be familiar with "various off-the-shelf blogging tools" (no surprise, it's BusinessWeek, not C|NET!). Apparently, I didn't have enough experience and never got to an interview.

Now that the site has been launched, it's another proof of how flawed the whole IT hiring process is. It's pure bullshit, especially the "graduate degree required" crap. A quick look at their blogs shows how they gave the job to someone who didn't know much about real-world blogs, especially those using MoveableType (the script I have experience with; and the one they used for their blogs). Here's some immediate flaws I found by spending 10 minutes on their site:

• They are using an outdated version of MT, where the commenters URLs are not encoded with a redirection script (or they haven't enabled this important feature). That's a big draw for comment spammers.


• All blogs are based in the same MT installation, that can help information diggers find some interesting results.


• Except for adding the BusinessWeek header and left bar, the designer hasn't done much with the default MT template.


• The pages are doctyped XHTML 1.0 transitional, but a quick check with the W3C validator finds 265 errors.


• They've kept the default mt-tb.cgi trackback file. Good luck with trackback spam!


• The creators forgot to rename the default mt-search.cgi file. Which btw, isn't linked to from anywhere on the site


• I found at least three open MT tags on their blog index page's source code, which apparently passed through the MT parser because they are wrongfully coded.

But goodluck to them anyway... I've got other more intelligent things on my mind. Oh, and nice headshots!

[Update]
I don't know how they fucked this one up, but apparently pinged URLs to their blog are being returned with the referrer's domain name. (See the 'trackbacks 2' links on this entry.)