by R.I. Pienaar | Sep 24, 2003 | Code
Since I put up this site I have been paying attention to my log files to see how it gets accessed. One of my main motivations for putting up a personal site is not to publish content or personal ideas etc but to study the blogging world, how it communicates and how information flows.
Obviously RSS [1, 2] and other XML technologies are the underlying technology that enables interesting services such as Technorati, Feedster, Blogosphere, Geoblog, Blogshares and many more and a study of this is essential. I have been looking for the RSS book for a while and might have to resort to ordering from Amazon.
There are however a lot more to a website than a XML file. The net is constantly being trawled by unwelcome guests these range from Email address harvesters, services that “monitor” your server, badly behaved search engine crawlers and bad people like the RIAA.
Here I present some strategies for combating these services from simply asking the well behaved ones to go away by using a robots.txt and by forcing the bad ones to go away by using mod_rewrite and other such methods.
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by R.I. Pienaar | Sep 15, 2003 | Code
Have you ever tried to search for reviews on the internet for any kind of gadget? I typically search for ‘whatever review’ and usually my search results are a mess of fake review sites, or the ones that rely solely on rantings by users.
While trying various ways to filter these from my searches I turned to PHP, read on for some information about using the Google API to filter your searches.
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by R.I. Pienaar | Sep 7, 2003 | Code
I usually use PGP to encrypt things like password lists and so forth. This is not always optimal as I sometimes worry about loosing my keys and would instead just want a simple password crypted file.
OpenSSL provides a simple method for encrypting and decrypting that is available on most Unix machines thesedays and even some Windows machines.
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by R.I. Pienaar | Sep 6, 2003 | Code
I often wonder about the quality of a RSS feed before adding it to my aggregator, something quick and simple. I installed Infinite Penguins RSS viewer and wrote a bookmarklet to access it easily, just drag the bookmarklet to your bookmark toolbar and type in a RSS url when prompted.
by R.I. Pienaar | Aug 27, 2003 | Code
UPDATE: Exim now has excellent built-in spam and virus scanning, this performs better and is more effective, you should now use that. I’ve closed the project at SourceForge and you won’t be able to get the files anymore.
This is a general mail manipulation system that features a powerfull plugin architecture using Perl. It was designed to work with Exim but plans are underway to possibly make it more MTA independant.
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