Laurabelle's Blog

If you tried to submit a comment a couple of hours ago, you probably noticed that the script formerly known as mt-comments.cgi was producing nice fat 500 server errors. Yup, that was me, tweaking (as ever) without having any clue what I was doing. Great learning experience, bad customer service. Bad Laurabelle. (Note to self: [...]

I did a lot of PHP and Perl hacking last night, modifying the PHP code I use to change stylesheets dynamically (so that I can use an external file to store the config data) and then writing some Perl code to duplicate the same functionality in my CGI scripts (mt-search.cgi and what used to be [...]

A dude named Scott Wiersdorf has written a script to harrass formmail trollers when they hit his site. It's a fun idea, but I think it actually would cause me more harm than good. That's my bandwidth they're using! Still, it makes me wonder if there's something I could do to get back at referrer [...]

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 [...]

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.

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 [...]

So I finally managed to solve the little problem I had with text boxes being too large. I tried everything and couldn't shrink it at all. And now it's fixed itself. What's the difference? I didn't use kdm (the KDE login manager). Of course xdm didn't work either, so I'm going back to using startx. [...]

The other day, when I was fiddling around with my templates and style sheets, one of the things I did was to separate out colors and layout into different files. This is very convenient because it means that I can add color stylesheets without having to duplicate the layout. Of course, if I change any [...]