more bits and pieces
I have, for some reason, been getting pounded by the Radio Community Server, which has been generating tens of thousands of http requests for non-existent pages and RSS feeds on my site. Because I am employing mod_rewrite
kludgery to hide blosxom.cgi
from the URL, it is in fact causing Blosxom to spawn every time a bogus request comes through. (I’m trying to figure out a way to fix this, by having Blosxom die with a 404 error anytime someone tries to request a bogus path. Because right now, it instead just serves up an empty page. Which can lead to horrific recursion.) This has caused my webhost to disable Blosxom.
But in my search for some possible solutions, I stumbled upon these random links. You will notice that a lot of them have nothing to do with the situation at hand.
- How to write a robots.txt file to exclude bots
- XSL considered harmful, an article published in 1999. (Link from as days pass.)
- Norman Walsh’s rebuttal to the XSL criticism, also written in 1999. You might remember Norman Walsh from such markup specifications as DocBook and XML. (I only know about him because DocBook stylesheets are used extensively by GNOME, and when I was a mad and crazy Linux user, I always wanted to be on the cutting edge and had to get the latest specs right from the horse’s mouth. But that is neither here nor there.)
File::Touch
. I was trying to write a perl script wrapper that preserves themtime
of my blog files before callingemacs
, because I wasn’t getting the entries_* plugins to work reliably in making themtime
s stick.- How to generate a 404 with a CGI script. This is kind of what I want. Now I just have to figure out how to get Blosxom to recognize when a request comes up empty.
- Apache 1.3 URL Rewriting Guide.