Duskrider's Blog

Well, I think it's just about done. That bad bot blocking script that I've been working on is almost ready to push out to the rest of my sites. What's more, I've decided to write it in such a way that I can distribute it to other webmasters in the hope that we can block as many bad bots as possible.

Yeah, that's my good deed for this month.

For more information, you can visit my CrawlSnare Page and read all about it. It isn't ready for public consumption yet, but I think it will be within a few weeks. I've had it running on this site for a little over three weeks with only a few problems, which has helped me iron out the last few bugs, at least I hope.

It will be interesting to see what kind of issues other people have with it, if any. This is the first script I've written for public consumption, so I don't have much experience with differing configuration files, different server setups, different versions of php, mySQL, and Apache, or even different file setups for things like .htaccess. Throw into that the different ways permissions are granted for file writing and creation and it should be interesting. Unfortunately I don't have any way to test the scripts on other server configurations. I *think* everything should work ok on other servers, but I have no way of knowing.

All of the sites I own, or administrate, are on the same box. That means that all the settings are the same for every site, so if the script works on one it will work on all. That's great for me, but maybe not for others. Time will tell. I'm sorry, by the way, if you happen to be someone who turns out to be a guinea pig. :)

As for my sitemap script, I think I've decided to buy one. Yes, I know. Why should I buy one when I can make one or find one for free? Well... it's mostly because I found one somewhere that I really like (or think I will) and it's not really very much to purchase a full license for it. It has a ton of features and would take me something like a month or more to code myself (given how much time I have to devote to personal coding during my day), so I figure I'll just purchase it and go the lazy man's route for this one. I'd put a link to the script up here, but I don't want to promote the thing until I know I'll like it for sure. Once I do, I'll put a little review up here for public consumption.

Oh, and if you get banned from my website, quit acting like a robot. :)

-Ed