Talking of the number of the beast
Apparently today is National Day of Slayer so dig out that old Slayer album (we all have them) and play it at full blast.
The command line can be Web 2.0
After I said the command line is ‘hardly the next generation of the web’ what should I stumble across but an Amazon mashup entitled Amazon CLI: 0-Click shopping.
In my opinion a command line interface to Amazon is pretty useless, indeed the author himself says
A command line terminal is the first thing that came to my mind. I understand that this isn’t exactly the most intuitive approach for many – I don’t care. I’m perfectly content being the only member of this site’s target audience.
Still it’s kind of unique. Perhaps someone will do an enhanced CLI for Talis’ MUTL competition.
The number of the Web 2.0 beast
I’ve been reading on various blogs that the latest definition of Web 2.0 is the “chmod 777 web”. This has to be the worst one yet. Chmod for those that don’t know (and you should be ashamed) is a Unix command for changing file and directory permissions. It is run from the command line, that’s right the command line, hardly the next generation of the web now is it?
Yes, I know it’s kind of apt that 777 means that everyone can have read, write and execute access to everything but for me it just implies Web 2.0 is a security risk. As every webmaster worth his salt should know, chmod 777 is a BAD thing.
Blocking the Technorati Bot
For reasons that I won’t go into we prefer to prevent Technorati from spidering certain content on our website. Unfortunately the “Technoratibot” does not respect the robots.txt convention. This standard was introduced in 1994 and quite frankly it’s appalling that Technorati do not adhere to it.
For a while I simply blocked the IP address of the bot using the following Apache “Deny from” in httpd.conf.
<Directory "DIRECTORY TO BLOCK">
Options None
AllowOverride None
Order deny,allow
Deny from IP ADDRESS
</Directory>
This worked well until they changed the IP Address, so I updated the conf file, but a few months later they changed it again!
I’ve now blocked the User Agent using the following Apache re-write rules:
<Directory "DIRECTORY TO BLOCK">
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Technoratibot.*
RewriteRule .* - [F,L]
</Directory>
Hopefully this will do the trick.
