…like Limbo dance – how low can you set the bar at launch that enough users will find in challenging to try to play.
Archive for June, 2007
Web 2.0 is…
Saturday, June 2nd, 2007Bad advertising
Saturday, June 2nd, 2007I often come across an ad that seems interesting enough to click it. When I do I’m usually disappointed, because I end up in a place I didn’t expect.
Dear advertisers!
When spending money on my click, if you’re advertising a product please take me to the product page, not your home page. I’m interested in the product, not you. Yes, this kind of teleportation is possible in the online world. The only thing you did is add a mental comment to your URL: “Can’t find what I’m looking for” that will probably make me go away even when I am buying something.
Learn from Victoria’s Secret…
Wife swap
Saturday, June 2nd, 2007Does anybody know what happened with “Wife swap” reality show in Slovenia? Did it happen and I haven’t noticed or was it canceled due to lack of interest? It was announced last December and was supposed to happen this spring. Did it?
By the way, its homepage was obviously killed – with the show?
Blogorola has ping – Apache rewriting with time
Saturday, June 2nd, 2007Had says, that Blogorola got a ping interface at http://api.blogorola.com/ping.
I hope this means that it won’t be requesting the feed every 2 minutes anymore. It’s should be getting a 304, but anyways…
Update #1: I posted a post in Slovenian. I have no idea what I was thinking. And I also figured out that it’s getting a 302, cause my feed is at Feedburner, a Google company…
Update #2: Hope floats. Blogorola’s “ItsyBitsy – spider” made 57 requests in the last 8 hours or so. My server doesn’t care much, cause it only serves a 302 and redirects to the FeedBurner hosted feed. What about yours? Are you willing to put up with this?
If you’re using Apache and mod_rewrite (chances are that you are) you can use mod rewrite to make sure the requests don’t go through to your backend and database with something like this:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^ItsyBitsy
RewriteCond %{TIME_HOUR} >00
RewriteCond %{TIME_HOUR} <06
RewriteRule . http://blackhole/ [R=307,L]
Add this to the .htaccess file in your WordPress folder (it should already be there) or basically anywhere on the server to disallow access to the spider at all times except at night when other traffic is low.
You could also use this to allow the spider to access the feed only when you're actually writing - e.g. you usually write your posts between 20 and 22 so you can allow access then, and send it to the "blackhole" at other times. You can also use this to server it different feeds at different times for whatever reason...
See more about rewriting with time at the Apache conf page or the rewrite guide.