The bigger news: You may have noticed the new block in the right-hand column which provides a link to a specific product on Amazon.com. I plan to feature only those books, DVDs, CDs or other gizmos you can ‘git on Amazon that I personally own and honestly think are excellent and worth buying. I am not looking for anyone to buy me this stuff - it’s not a wish-list! How does this work? As an Amazon associate, I get a small percentage of any sales that these links generate (if you click the link, stick the loot in your ‘cart’ and subsequently buy the thing, I get credit).

click ‘read more’ for smaller news.Smaller news: I added a small block on the left near the user functions block with a quick link to the ‘Retrieve Password’ page. A user who forgot their password and wasn’t able to figure out how to retrieve their password, suggested that it wasn’t really obvious enough.

Warning: boring website administration story follows. I’ve been having some troubles with one of the pages I maintain here, and I think it’s finally resolved. This is just the story of what I think happened. The more complex pages I have set up have been chugging along fine, while the simplest of them, in8snotes, a weblog powered by the perl script Blosxom (and some related plugins) was getting hammered by a ‘very hungry’ indexing ‘bot. Yes, I did say a ‘bot was bringing the site down - a bot is a program that ‘web crawls’ and indexes pages it finds and stores the results in a database. Usually sites like Google and Yahoo will index the web to gather info about the web for later serving to you on searches you make, but ‘bots can also be used for more nefarious purposes - like harvesting email addresses for later spamming, or selling the information gleaned to marketing companies.

It’s unfair of me to attempt to pawn the problem off on the ‘bot entirely, since I think I was partially responsible for the problem. I would tune into my site at some point in the day and there would be a big unfriendly ‘Account suspended’ page greeting me. This was bad for a couple reasons, not least because it referred folks to the billing department, making me look like a deadbeat who couldn’t make the measly payment for an el-cheapo linux-based hosted web page.

Each time I would investigate the issue, I’d find a zillion hits from the Omni-Explorer Bot, and although their rather spartan website offered helpful hints on how to block the bot (by offering their IP range and some text to stick in your robots.txt file), these steps didn’t seem to stop the bot. I would tune into my site the following week and be locked out again

Each time I was slammed, it seems the bot was attempting to connect to my Bloxsom pages, making several connections every second and pounding the hell out of the server. Any page served up by that server would take several seconds to load. (Logged in through ssh and running ‘top’ would give load values like 45.5 - which is a severe workload, you usually see figures under 1.0)

As the little text bit on the page states: “Blosxom is a perl script whose functionality here is extended through several plugin scripts in order to dynamically assemble a multitude of separate plain text files stored in a directory tree on the server into a cohesive, dated and RSS enabled weblog.” It’s a fantastic way to organize those little text files that seem to accumulate on your computer. If they are important enough to save in the first place, why not organize them better so you can find stuff?

In dealing with the troubles, I have had to deal with the web hosting company, who have been very patient with me, and although they had never heard of Blosxom, they didn’t ban me from using it. I imagine the fact that I have several other paying websites with them helps a little bit in negotiations with them, but to be honest, they are the best service I’ve had so far - very responsive. If you would like their name - email me (link at top right of this page). I’ve also contacted (and received responses from) the ‘bots creators and maintainers. My last correspondance was hasty and heated and I threatened them with legal action because they said they would remove me from their database, but subsequently shut me down again. Oh well, if we’re both at fault, perhaps this story on my site will make it up to them in some small way.

Blosxom has a venerable history on the web, and is not known to have any vulnerabilities like this. Finally having a moment to take a look at the page, I will still willing to accept that I may have changed something in the script accidentally to cause a problem. It wasn’t easy to accept however - since the bulk of the site is ‘mirrored’ on my personal laptop - it’s an exact copy of what is running on my machine and so anything here is there and there, here. This was why it was hard to believe when I noticed they were working differently. I have several plugins installed for Blosxom, the links to them are on the site. Breadcrumbs and categorytree were not functioning the same as they did on my laptop.

I started by disabling the plugins, and then ‘diffing’ them (Diff is a unix command you can use to compare two text files - it spits out any differences between them to the screen). They were the same. The Blosxom script (kept separately in my site’s cgi-bin directory) was also the same (except for logical differences due to the fact that they are running on different servers).

Totally baffled as to why they would be acting differently, I remembered that I had an .htaccess file setting (a rewrite rule) on the remote server that is not needed on my laptop. The
original note for that setting is actually in my Blosxom log. The rule ‘rewrites’ the URL in the address bar of your browser to execute the script in the cgi-bin directory, but not display it up there. This seemed to be related to the strageness I was seeing in my site: Clicking a link on the remote page would work, but then subsequent links would start at that level, building up incorrect links. example: if you clicked on ‘computers’ on the remote site, the URL would be displayed as http://in8sworld.net/notes/computers, but then if you clicked on ‘fun’, instead of starting over again at http://in8sworld.net/notes, it would start at the computers subdirectory, tack on fun to build http://in8sworld.net/notes/computers/fun (and fail to find anything).

The Blosxom script has a ‘preferred base url’ section which I have never used, and don’t use on my laptop: $url = “”; The $url variable was empty for both the laptop and the remote site. I decided to manually set $url for the remote site as ‘http://in8sworld.net/notes’, and try that. Hooray! Everything started working again. I’m almost positive this used to work on the remote site, so I’m thinking something must have changed on the server.

In any case, I have the full range of Omni_Explorer’s IPs blocked, a deny rule in my robots.txt file and I have fixed up the Blosxom script. Hopefully you won’t be greeted by any more ‘account suspended’ messages upon visiting here, but if you do - perhaps next time I’ll solicit help from you guys first.

This really has little to do with Geeklog, but I don’t have a topic reserved for cool php scripts… I’ve been using php iCalendar for a while now. From their site, “PHP iCalendar is a PHP-based iCal file viewer/parser to display iCals in a Web browser. Its based on v2.0 of the IETF spec. It displays iCal files in a nice logical, clean manner with day, week, month, and year navigation. It is available in 13 languages and includes support for printing, searching and RSS news feeds.” My personal webcal (login required, sorry) can now be subscribed to using the iCal standard!Why is this cool? Well, if you are using Outlook, which uses a proprietary calendar format and not the open ical standard you may not care. However, if you are on a Mac and use Apple’s iCal*or* if you have been brave enough to try out the Mozilla calendar project lately (which is available for multiple platforms including Windows), you can co-ordinate your schedule with friends, family and work by publishing and subscribing to ‘webcals’ or ical (.ics) calendars.

You don’t need to have a website to take advantage of the programs above, those are ‘clients’ which allow you to store and organize your appointments (think yearly recurring birthday reminders, important events months away you’re likely to forget, etc.). But these programs have added functionality in that they allow you to ’subscribe’ to internet provided ‘webcal’ feeds. Much like RSS which has gotten lots of attention recently, calendars can be published to the web and updated through these clients by a maintainer. Others can ’subscribe’ to the calendars and the dates appear in their client. I subscribe to lots of different calendars like Christian, Jewish, Islamic, Chinese holidays. I have friends of various faiths and it’s cool to be able to wish someone a happy ‘Isra Me’raj’ on the appropriate day.

If you have a website, or a machine that can run a webserver with php installed, installing iCalendar allows you to easily ‘publish’ your client-maintained calendar for others to share. Getting this script up and going is incredibly easy. Just download the latest version (I’m using 2.0 beta now), place it into an appropriate directory on your server, and upload ics files to the calendar directory. There are a couple of configuration lines to change to get publishing working, and to set up some nominal security, but that’s all documented in the config file itself. Then you just point your browser to the directory and you can see the ical information displayed nicely therein. Although more limited than a true ‘web calendar’ which would allow you to edit dates and events through the browser, iCalendar gets my personal jobs done nicely. For work we use a workhorse perl script running on Linux: Calcium for many years to co-ordinate.

Since I don’t lug around a laptop all day (like some), I find it useful to have my iCal calendar published on the web where it’s accessible from anywhere I can get on the net.

I’ve also integrated the day’s events into the main blog in a small right hand block, since iCalendar is RSS enabled as well.

Overall, iphpcalendar has proven to be one of the simplest, cleanest, easiest to use php script tools I’ve used. Their website had been down for some time, but I kept that link to them on my favorites page hoping they’d be back. Now that they’ve popped up again, I thought I’d toot their horn a bit!

Well, opening up the site for anonymous comments has brought me butt-loads of annoying referrer spam comments and *nothing* worth keeping. I’ll load the site and see about 20 comments, and every one of them is a stupid comment about how great my site is coupled with about 20 links to some website in an attempt to raise that site’s Google ranking. I’ve added two plugins to attempt to stem the problem, while keeping anonymous comments enabled (for now).

Installed: SpamX and Ban plugins from
pigstyle.net by tomw.

The site was down all day due to a hardware failure (drive went bad). There were apparently some changes in the rebuild and I think I’ll be finding things broken here and there, so if you see something not functioning please report it to me! Thanks for your patience.

Again with thanks to Oliver of Tokyoahead.com, you can now quickly access a filtered story list for all topics on this site by clicking on the “Topics” link in the main menu along the top of the site. This is set up for both the professional theme and the Smooth Blue theme if you have chosen to use that in your logon preferences.

You’ve probably already noticed the image block at right which displays images from stories and static pages buried deep in the site and links to them. This comes to you via a cool php hack by Oliver Spiesshofer of http://tokyoahead.com. I wish now that I had taken the extra time to add more images to the stories in the past! Most stories have no such associated images, and so won’t show up in the neat-o block.