Apache

Banning blog leaches

On another website I recently noticed that another party was sucking in the RSS feed and publishing it to their site. Not a headline or two, not a snippet and a pointer, but the whole thing. They are doing it with dozens of sites. It's the RSS equivalent of framing sites.

Fortunately most of the folks who are doing this sort of thing have their own server and all the requests come from their server. If that's the case it's pretty easy to tell Apache to make the site dark for all their requests. By adding something like the following in httpd.conf the offending leach is cut off.

    Order allow,deny
    Allow from all
    Deny from nnn.nnn.nnn.nnn

I'm curious to see how long it takes before the operator of the leach realizes they have gotten 403 errors for weeks now.

More on the upgrade

I've been spending a lot of time lately upgrading PHP and drupal. My mistakes of a few days ago were due in large part to not copying the new .htaccess file over. It contains the rewrite rules for all the old formats as well as the much more readable (and indexable) clean URLs.

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