The WWW/La TTT

Wow, I was just looking at the server report for yesterday on SSQ and I noticed a lot of hits yesterday. I was kind of surprised. I mean I know it's a really great site, but oh so many hits! Anyway, I get down to the User Agent report (Easyspace call it `browser' - morons) and I find seven requests are bots, one is Konquorer (not me!) and six are MSIE.

I'm quite impressed, there was Googlebot, Pompos, msnbot, Gaisbot, ZyBorg, Ask Jeeves/Teoma and Netcraft.
Of the above bots, I found Googlebot, Pompos and Gaisbot to be the best behaved. Their user-agent string included the name of their bot as the user-agent with a URL to information about their bots in brackets. MSNbot was quite polite too although they should think about putting the bot FAQ in the page they link to rather than having to go further to find the information I want. Zyborg was very impolite, just take a look at the UA-string:
Mozilla/4.0 compatible ZyBorg/1.0 Dead Link Checker (wn.dlc@looksmart.net; http://www.WISEnutbot.com)
First of all, It's a bot, not a fucking web browser so why is it pretending to be Mozilla compatible? Second, the compatible part should be in the brackets. Oh, and if you include a URL, make sure it's to a bot FAQ - I don't want to look at the search engine that recieves the data, I want an FAQ!
But at least I got a link, not as much can be said for Netcraft and Ask Jeeves/Teoma. Not only did they perport to be Mozilla-compatible but they failed to include a URL to a bot FAQ.
I may have to write some emails...

The report is useful but an actual access/error log would be useful. It's good that they make a useful report out of all the data but I'd like to have access to the actual log. For example there's a report on status codes returned. One is 301 (Document Moved Permanantly), I can guess what that refers. But there's also 2 405s (Method not allowed) - I know that's just script kiddies/viri trying to use buffer-overruns thinking Easyspace are running MSIIS but it had better as hell give me URIs when there's a 404 or 403.

Aparantly there were two requests for /Core%20%20files/ (probably a robot with an out-of-date link) but I'd still like to see which UAs tried to access it.

The most hillarious thing about the page is that it says it's HTML 2.0. I put it through the validator and it checks out - it is valid HTML 2.0.

Oh yeah, here's a redundant article on how MS Word sucks. I've been saying this for a while now, but does anybody listen? Noooo...
He goes on to propose something equally crazy:
"I concluded that the program is out of control and needs to be scrapped. Users should all be given some new program for an upgrade charge of $10 just to get everyone on the same page."
I agree it is out of control (or rather under somebody else's control), but why would anybody want to get something equally as crappy for $10? Why not get something better for $0?

lol! I just made a very amusing discovery - I found that the UA-string of Firefox causes Easypspace to classify it as Netscape - i.e. they thing everything that starts as "Mozilla/x.x" but doesn't have "compatible" in brackets is Netscape! Firefox proclaims itself to me Mozilla because, strangely enough, it's Mozilla code, engine, etc.. It is a baby of Mozilla yet it's classified as Netscape, morons.

Oh yeah, I just found the error report for last wednesday - it has a list of failed requests in the /Artists%20files/ directory yet I have no way of knowing whether it was a bot, somebody who has old bookmarks or a website with links to those files. Fucking useless! Anyway, I put up a 404 page at /err/404.html and added an entry into .htaccess. I'm thinking about a favicon - they're supported by most browsers (including w3m-el!) so it's more prominent in people's bookmarks. I'm also thinking about one for myself, you know, for my minisite which shall feature my bio I posted the other day, the CV page I made (very pretty but kind of sparse when it comes to information) and an index file linking to them and my blog.
We'll see. Anyway, ttyl.