blog related: July 2005 Archives

Looking around the interweb last night and feeling in a bit of an egotistical mood, I thought I'd check to see how many other people linked to me. And the answer was.... well, not many. Do I care? Yes, a little, if I'm being honest!

But one of the links did interest me. Apparently my site is listed on Blogshares, and what's more, a couple of people had bought shares in me. I'd seen blogshares before, a few months ago, but it was about two o'clock in the morning and I wasn't really in the mood to see what it was all about. So I promptly forgot all about it. But seeing that I'm now being traded on a virtual stock market I thought I'd now pay a bit more attention.

So if you scroll down the page a bit (the main index page, that is) you'll see a new link section for BlogShares. I've claimed my blog, bought some shares in Annie's blog, and am making a grovelling request for anyone who feels like linking to me to do so, because as well as making me feel more wanted, it will also increase the value of my blog! Also, there are 250 unclaimed shares in my blog up for grabs, so get 'em while they're good.

I've no idea how much I'll play on the virtual blog stock market, but hey, it's something to keep an eye on :-)

I've not disappeared off the face of the planet, I'm still here :-) It's been an eventful week, that's for sure. On Monday I learned that my great aunt Ann had passed away at the age of 79. I didn't know her that well as she'd lived in Bouremouth on the south coast for most of her life, moving back to Manchester after her husband passed away a couple of years ago. Although I didn't get to go to the funeral, I went to the evening "shiva" (prayer meeting) to offer my condolences to the family, and catch up with various cousins I hadn't seen for years and years.

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I had a call from my ex on Tuesday evening to say that she didn't think there'd be a lot for our son to do in Edinburgh, so she was thinking of taking him to Legoland in Windsor instead. She suggested that we spent two days in Legoland, and one day in London taking in some of the sights there. She wants to take him onto the London Eye, and also to the Natural History Museum (he's very much into dinosaurs!) and maybe the Planetarium as well. I'm sure that we can fill a day out in London without any problem. All that sounded pretty good to me, as I wouldn't mind visiting all these places as well. I called her back on Thursday to find out if the new bomb scare in London had put her off going there with the lad, and she said "God, no." So she's booked the hotel (two rooms, of course) and I've booked Legoland and the London Eye. I'm really looking forward to it (surprisingly enough!)

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In addition to this site, I have another domain which I have hosted somewhere else. I use this other domain for testing out databases, scripts, online shopping carts, bulletin boards and so on. Just so I'm familiar with the concepts of how to set up and administer them, really. Anyway, looking at the stats for the blog last week I noticed that quite a few were being referred from www.drupal.org, and I thought "what's this then?" I took a peek and found out it was a content management system you can download and install. "Cool," I thought. "I'll have a play around with that, it might be useful for work." So I set it up during my lunch break one day and had a quick look around. The plan was to spend some time in the evening and at the weekend learning how it was put together and whether it would actually do what I wanted it to do. That evening I tried to access it from home, but all I got was a "document returned no data" error message. I got the same thing when I tried to access the web hosting company's main page. I could ping the sites, I could trace the route to the sites, I just couldn't call them up in my browser. This happened from Firefox and IE6 in Windows, and also when I tried to use the Konqueror browser from my linux partition. Taking my firewall out of the equation didn't make any difference, either.

My cousin and my brother could access the sites from their machines, and I could access them from work, but that didn't do me a lot of good when I wanted to get to them from my home PC. So then I thought, stuff this for a game of soldiers, my brother has a hosting reseller account, I'll give him some money and he can host the site for me (I insisted on paying him for the hosting, he spent money getting the reseller account and all he's doing is hosting sites for friends at vastly reduced rates, and not getting his investment back. The least I could do is throw some money his way instead of to two other hosting companies on the other side of the Atlantic.)

I called him, he set it all up and within the hour I was uploading my blog to the new web host. It took a little bit of tweaking to get it all set up and working again, and I've also set up this drupal system to have a play with that. I'm extremely impressed with how quickly everything got set up, although remembering at the last minute to download a backup of my site was rather fortunate - I'd have been stuffed if I'd decided to wait another 10 minutes before backing it all up!

I thought I'd post a little more about web stats in general, and also about the results of yesterday's blog maintenance. In case any of you have the capability of looking at your own web stats and don't know what it is you're looking at, here's a line from mine which I'll talk you through. As I did yesterday, I've edited the URL in question.

81.240.255.226 - - [12/Jul/2005:15:16:20 -0400] "GET /cgi-bin/mt-bdcc.cgi?entry_id=174 HTTP/1.1" 200 2827 "http://zzz.hawaiiansurvey.org/online-casinos.html" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows NT 5.0; AIRF)"

Taking this bit by bit we have:
81.240.255.226 - this is the IP address where the request originated
[12/Jul/2005:15:16:20 -0400] - this is the date and time my web host served the file
"GET /cgi-bin/mt-bdcc.cgi?entry_id=174 HTTP/1.1" - this is the name of the file requested. mt-bdcc.cgi is (was) the name of my comments script, and this particular request would have returned the comments for entry number 174 on my blog (which actually doesn't have any comments, so that proves that they're just looking at random)
200 - this is the success code returned by the web server, saying that it has sent the requested page to the person that requested it. Other codes are 404 (file not found), 403 (forbidden), 304 (partial content)
2827 - this is the size of the file in bytes.
"http://zzz.hawaiiansurvey.org/online-casinos.html" - this is the referring web page
"Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows NT 5.0; AIRF)" - this is the identification string for the browser the surfer was using.

When you're scanning down the log file and you see dozens, if not hundreds, of consecutive requests for the same file, from the same referrer, it leaps out at you. From what I can see these requests started on 15 June, although why they started and what led them to my site I've no idea.

Here's another one:
67.28.112.46 - - [14/Jul/2005:20:14:16 -0400] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 48898 "http://zzz.bestfreedirectory.com/" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows 98)"

What's noticeable about this is that the page requested ("GET / HTTP/1.1") is the root (index) page, indicated by the single slash in the middle there. My index page at the time was 48K in size. This is not so bad on its own, but since July 10 they have requested my index page 610 times. 580 of those requests were yesterday alone. So they've gone very quickly indeed into my ban list. In fact, since I renamed my comments script and started adding IP addresses into the ban list, I've had 1115 requests for a page that no longer exists, and 503 requests from people who have been banned. And I still don't know exactly what they're after.

I may well be, in the long term, fighting a losing battle, but for now I think I'm mounting a half-decent defence.

I decided the other day, out of sheer boredom and a strong desire to end it all, to take a look at my web stats. See if I could work out where my visitors were coming from, that sort of thing. I can't remember the last time I looked at my stats, but what I found was quite an eye-opener.

My top 20 referrers were all online poker sites. This is odd, I thought, so I downloaded the raw log file to examine it in more detail. I discovered that these web pages (a typical, slightly modifed, example being http://xxx.poker-4all.com/online-poker.html) were all accessing my comments page, from different IP addresses. I can only guess that there are people out there loading pages on a cash-for-clicks basis, or perhaps running a trojan behind the scenes which loads pages and scans them for email addresses for spamming at a later date. This annoyed the hell out of me for two reasons. One, they're skewing my web stats out of all recognition, and two, they're using up my bandwidth. The swines. It also annoyed me because I'd already renamed my comments script once, and the bots were loading pages via the renamed script. So it wasn't some script blindly searching for mt-comments.cgi - this script knew what I'd renamed it to.

First things first, I renamed the script again. This only takes a couple of minutes, and after rebuilding the first page of the site again everything was working normally, and visitors can leave comments again. From now on the bots would be getting a 404 page not found error. At least until they discovered the new name of the comments script, which actually isn't all that difficult to find since it's in plain view for all to see in the page source of any entry with comments on. It looks like I might be renaming the script on a regular basis from now on.

I looked at the IP addresses of the offending visitors. There were lots of different ones, of course, but some seemed to come up more than others. I had noticed on my web host's control panel that I can block access from certain named IP addresses or URL's, so I thought I'd give this a go. I may be swimming against the tide here, but I thought I had nothing to lose by trying anyway! I made a list of the worst culprits, and added them to my IP ban list. Nothing to do now but wait.

A few hours later, I went back to look at my stats. Sure enough, there were still lots of requests for random comments pages, still coming from poker and casino sites. But they were all getting 404's now. That was still using up some bandwidth (the 404 error page was loading up each time) but now I saw something else. The IP addresses I'd banned were still coming back, but at least now they were getting a "403 forbidden access" error. A small victory, heheh.

I'll keep an eye on this over the next few weeks. There is one small consolation for those of you who have commented on my site. Your email addresses are not shown in the page source of the comments page. However your own url's are visible, and if the bot follows these links and gets your email address off your own page, well, there's not a lot I can do about that. That's the way the internet works, I'm afraid. Then again, anyone who puts an email address on a web page can expect spam sooner or later. gMail seems to be pretty good at filtering it all out, which is why I use my gMail address on my own site and also when I leave comments on other sites.

Hopefully after a few days (weeks, months?) my web stats will tidy up a bit and I'll get a more accurate picture of where my visitors are coming from.

Now, was that the most boring post in the world or not?

I can't remember how I stumbled across Michele's site, but I'm sure glad I did. She has a wonderful way of making me forget all about my day-to-day life and start thinking about utterly trivial (and sometimes not-so-utterly-trivial) things. And of course there's the weekend meet-and-greet, without which I'm sure this blog would be read by about three people, all of whom I'm related to.

I'm also grateful for the comments I receive, and I check out all of your sites. And it is from Cheryl's site that I found Dog Eat Doug, which is fan-bloody-tastic. And from the Dog Eat Doug site I found Doug TenNapel's site. He's one of the authors of my all-time favourite game (and the first game I ever bought for the PC, way back in 199-whatever-it-was), the Neverhood. No-one else I've mentioned this game to has ever heard of it, which is a shame in my opinion, coz it's witty, inventive and fun. I'm glad I found someone who knows of someone who knows of the original author. Six degrees of separation and all that. The Neverhood is also my son's all-time favourite game, in fact I played the Neverhood with him again from start to finish a couple of weekends ago. He's also keen on the Myst games, and the Monkey Island games as well.

Anyway, cheers :-)