Laurabelle's Blog

Somebody at Google had a great idea that I didn't even think about: marking links that shouldn't be considered when calculating PageRank. Actually I shouldn't be surprised that they thought of it; after all, PageRank is their crown jewel. The magic is simple: add the attribute/value pair rel="nofollow" to any link. This means I can [...]

Horace sure is a big help around the house. I haven’t even finished Jeff’s sweater yet, and Horace is already performing quality control. I was really worried for a minute there, but I guess it’s going to be okay. I think this is the only sweater that might actually shed on Horace, rather than the [...]

I'm running into a kind of sticky problem with CSS. I would really like to have a slightly transparent background on my sidebar, and I can do that. However, this also causes the child elements of the div to become slightly transparent, which renders the transparency rather pointless. You see, the reason I want a [...]

Seen in my Apache access log today, the weirdest user-agent string in the world: "wnty w1gNNqlvdbibdnvcNcpmnqwfbfisgol1l" There's only the one hit (for /help.php). Google doesn't seem to know anything at all, so I'm clueless but curious.

From an email I wrote my mother this morning. I could hardly stop laughing, not least because I can see myself doing exactly the same thing. Mom wrote: >I wrote: >> Did Dad give you your birthday present from me? I gave it >> to him for safekeeping -- but I wouldn't be surprised if [...]

Using tricks from Parker and Dorothea, I've grown my own referrer-spam-fighting fu. In addition, I've translated my old bot-fighting rules (which were using ModRewrite) into less-heavy SetEnvIf rules. That should make Kevin a little happier. I have a few more strings to add to the collective killfile: jmsimonr|middlecay|neweighweb|targetindustries|zalaszentgrot|zone-b51| One problem I've noticed is that referrer [...]

Spammers have been sprinkling my access logs with referrer spam. I'm not in the habit of checking my webstats obsessively, but lately there are a couple of broken bots that have been generating 404's a lot and sending me emails about it. (My 404 error page is a script that emails me when there's an [...]

I recently read Terry Pratchett's newest Discworld novel, Going Postal. The whole book was very good, but even if it wasn't, it all would have been worth it for one single line. An omniscope is one of the most powerful instruments known to magic, and therefore one of the most useless. It can see everything, [...]

My chin, lips, cheek, and right nostril are cleaner than they've ever been. Talk about exfoliation — loofahs haven't got anything on kitten-tongue. I take it as a compliment that Stella feels the need to groom me, although it can become a bit uncomfortable. Her tongue is scratchy, of course, and she alternates licks with [...]

A few days ago I gave you the holiday bullet points. Today you get the slide show. I knitted Christmas presents for a number of people, but I only have pictures of those I sent to Ralph and Lori. These I finished and mailed at the beginning of December, so I didn’t even see them [...]