Thursday October 14, 2004

The Referer Spam battle rages on

The referer spam scum have been coming on in waves the last few days. I keep deleting them and updating my blocking list. Dunno if it's doing much good, but you may want to update your list as well.

Anyone caught with a referer that matches from that list receives a 403. This is rather a viscious response I think, and now I'm afraid I'll have to get tougher (log the IP address of offenders and refuse them as well). I fear this will result in collateral damage as dialup dynamic IPs rotate from offenders to the innocent.
( Oct 14 2004, 12:49:00 PM ) Technology Permalink Comments [2]
Trackback: http://www.brainopolis.com/roller/trackback/lance/Weblog/the_referer_spam_battle_rages

For further reading on today's posts:

Blogging Roller : Lance comments on recent surge in referrer spam. I've been deleting referrers and adding ugly new ignore words to my Roller installation on a daily basis this week. It is really getting bad. Three options I would like to see in Roller:

Wednesday October 06, 2004

re: more travel Funny how things work out. Cameron was scheduled to be in town today. Unfortunately he didn't have time to get together for beer. So how serendipitous that I was invited at the last minute to attend a presentation on Coherence!
( Oct 06 2004, 02:59:19 PM ) Personal Permalink
Trackback: http://www.brainopolis.com/roller/trackback/lance/Weblog/re_more_travel

Thursday September 30, 2004

Better now and busy. Back on the 5th of August I wrote about a couple spam problems I was having. Shortly afterward I rolled the new functionality into Roller (a Roller-wide Referer-Spam list), and I used it to block requests with those referers (they get a 403 Denied).

My site has continued to be stable ever since then and I haven't seen nearly so much CPU usage. Sadly, I've been very busy with work and family the last month and haven't had time for much of anything, let alone more Roller enhancements.
( Sep 30 2004, 06:55:22 AM ) Roller Permalink
Trackback: http://www.brainopolis.com/roller/trackback/lance/Weblog/better_now_and_busy

Tuesday September 14, 2004

Tree of Life, Tree of Death

I don't know what Jen will think of this, but I like it. That page doesn't explain it all, so follow the Project link too. Warning: slow-loading site.
( Sep 14 2004, 12:02:01 PM ) Personal Permalink Comments [1]
Trackback: http://www.brainopolis.com/roller/trackback/lance/Weblog/tree_of_life_tree_of

Friday September 03, 2004

toString() is a dangerous weapon

I just spend a couple hours trying to figure out why I couldn't get something out of a Map after I'd put it in. I added all sorts of debug output which showed that the URL I was using for a key went in, but somehow it wasn't there milliseconds later.

After chasing my tail for god-knows-how-long it finally dawned on me that I was putting a URL instance in but requesting a url String?! The confusing was that printing out the URL object and the URL string looked exactly the same. URL.toString(): dangerous.

Doh!
( Sep 03 2004, 10:49:40 AM ) Technology Permalink Comments [3]
Trackback: http://www.brainopolis.com/roller/trackback/lance/Weblog/tostring_is_a_dangerous_weapon

Tuesday August 17, 2004

Re: This is about Atom

Beautiful. I hope the more vocal members of the Atom mailing list read it. I think Matt makes some important points that these members need to keep in mind, not that some of them aren't already.

But what Atom says is: If you want to play the weblog game, this is the metadata you need. That, and some other stuff (it's all in the Atom spec).

. . .

What Atom says is: If you want to afford these behaviours, then you have to be weblog-like in this respect and editor-like in this respect, and it doesn't matter what else you do, but those are the shapes we require.

( Aug 17 2004, 08:32:33 AM ) Atom Permalink
Trackback: http://www.brainopolis.com/roller/trackback/lance/Weblog/re_this_is_about_atom

Friday August 13, 2004

Thanks Rusty

While trying to make Roller more friendly to non-ascii users we ran into the issue of non-ascii characters used in entry titles. These munged the permalinks we generated, until someone (Jaap, was it you?) was clever enough to escape these characters. Today Rusty announced the posting of the Internationalized Resource Identifiers draft, a standard which could really help to alleviate the current problems with non-ascii text in URLs.
( Aug 13 2004, 01:03:51 PM ) Technology Permalink
Trackback: http://www.brainopolis.com/roller/trackback/lance/Weblog/thanks_rusty

Monday August 09, 2004

Another "Perfect Weblog System" post

This post is an interesting mix of subjective and objective requirements.

I find it interesting that so many people (who already use MoveableType) assert that /YYYY/MM/DD/ is the best (most un-crufty) URL structure. I started with Blogger, took a look at Radio, and now use Roller. They all do things a bit different, and I think it is all on preferences. Of course, one of my "dream features" for Roller is that you could use any one of the 'popular' URL formats to get to the same place.

In any case, it is a good rundown and does highlight several important bits on how to present good (semantic) content. Make sure to follow his link to Henri Sivonen: Outlining the 'Ultimate' Blogging Server which in turn links to Matthew "mpt" Thomas' outline of "The ultimate Weblogging system", on which I've commented before. ( Aug 09 2004, 10:33:35 AM ) Technology Permalink Comments [2]
Trackback: http://www.brainopolis.com/roller/trackback/lance/Weblog/another_perfect_weblog_system_post

For further reading on today's posts:

Blogging Roller : Lance on the perfect weblog system and gender issues | Comments [0]