February 26th, 2003:

[city portraits]

[city portraits]

Mark Pilgrim writes regarding how to block spambots, ban spybots, and tell unwanted robots to go to hell. Even if you aren’t having trouble with evil website robots (programs that download every page of your website in search of various pieces of information that are rarely of any value to you) or don’t intend to do anything to fight back it’s worth reading just to see how many of them are out there. Mark has done a great job of compiling a list of such offenders and giving detailed instructions for forbidding them to access the data on your webserver. After all, why should we pay for the bandwidth they use to eventually provide services that hurt us.

If you live in the UNIX shell and are very directory oriented then Comment may be a useful tool. It allows you to leave yourself notes in various directories. It stores its data in plain text, so you can use regular UNIX tools to search, sort, and rummage through the notes you have left.

• Comment stores comments on a per directory basis. Your comments are relevant to your location
  Leave reminders for…
  • how to compile a source file
  • what state a particular document was in before you had to leave
  • which parameters to use in order to invoke a program to do what you want
  • collaborative working notes
  • …the possibilities go on
• Comment also keeps a central store of all your own personal comments in your home directory, available at any time for you to search.
• Comment stores data in a plain text format, allowing you to use existing text tools to search and manipulate as you need
• Comment uses UNIX file access rights for easy control of permissions

Unfortunately, regardless of how hard I try not to, I tend to save everything to the root of my home directory and then forget later to delete or remove it. Therefore, this tool isn’t very helpful for me.

The Python Desktop Server, aka Radio Killer, looks very promising. If you’re a Python lover, or are looking for a full-featured website management (which includes weblog functionality) then this might be the tool for you.