Banning blog leaches

December 7, 2006

On another website I recently noticed that another party was sucking in the RSS feed and publishing it to their site. Not a headline or two, not a snippet and a pointer, but the whole thing. They are doing it with dozens of sites. It's the RSS equivalent of framing sites.

Fortunately most of the folks who are doing this sort of thing have their own server and all the requests come from their server. If that's the case it's pretty easy to tell Apache to make the site dark for all their requests. By adding something like the following in httpd.conf the offending leach is cut off.

    Order allow,deny
    Allow from all
    Deny from nnn.nnn.nnn.nnn

I'm curious to see how long it takes before the operator of the leach realizes they have gotten 403 errors for weeks now.

Playing sick

December 7, 2006

National Public Radio had a story yesterday on people calling in sick when they really aren't. They asked and the expert gave some of the most egregious instances of people who didn't need sick time but called in anyway. One of those was someone who called in because they were searching for their horse who had gotten out. While it may or may not strictly qualify for sick time it seems that the expert engaged has never been a horse owner or never come to realize that things like that happen. In the last half-decade I've used about 4 sick days. Two of them came after spending all night up with horses and being exhausted.

It is always amazing how much perspective colors what is viewed as reasonable or unreasonable.

Nevadans need to vote with their feet

December 5, 2006

A group of twenty businesses are trying to overthrow the will of the voters of the state of Nevada.

Whether the businesses are ultimately successful in their attempt to prevent clean breathable air, Nevadans need to vote with our feet. The facts do not support the business owner's claims. Business owners at a few, unscrupulous businesses are threatening their employees with loosing jobs because of the measure. Other localities that have passed similar measures find that restaurant business often goes up after enacting smoke-free laws.

These businesses, however, would rather prey on the fears of their employees instead of complying with a law that a majority of the state. Quite simply the time has come for Nevadans to tell these businesses we don't appreciate their antics. We need to take our business to establishments that respect all Nevadans not just those who smoke in restaurants.

Drupal login problem with PHP 5.2

December 3, 2006

Having recently upgraded to PHP 5.2 on one of the servers I run I needed to throw a new Drupal site together this evening. All was well until you tried to navigate to any page after logging in. Access Denied was the response on every page. It turns out this is a known issue and is fixed in the latest development release of Drupal 4.7. If you're running PHP 5.2 make sure you download 4.7-dev instead of Drupal 4.7.4.

Five simple steps to kill your blog

December 3, 2006

Until recently I'd kept pace with several blogs that I'd come across for various reasons in the past. Many were former colleagues or people who I'd bumped into at one time or another. Some are interesting and good, some are more hair-shirts but enough curiosity about how people react to failure or success kept them interesting. In these traversals of the web I've come upon several sure-fire ways of making your blog fall off my RSS Reader's reading list.

Without further ado here are five surefire ways to make your blog worth less.

5. Profess knowledge of things you know little about. Just because you liked to cook mac & cheese in college and you have taken a class or two at the local chef's school doesn't mean you should start blogging a series of articles about cooking. If you must remember these are your experiences not anything related to well-researched or reasoned methods.

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