Frustration – Finalé

Well, according to my nedstat page of referrers the script I put in place yesterday to block google’s image search is working nicely, and the count of referrals from that page is coming down slowly. It should be completely off the list by tomorrow, with luck.

I’m still debating whether I do a nice page saying “you’re looking at this from Google, which I’ve blocked. Now fuck off” or just to leave it as a 404 “Page not found”. The 404 error takes up a whole load less bandwidth, that’s for sure. So hmm, not certain yet.

As it is, I’m almost certainly going to get caned a bit on bandwidth again this month, as I’m already at 2Gb of my allocated 3Gb, so the odds are that I’ll go over. After all, there’s still three weeks of the month to go yet. I’m going to keep an eye on what else is referring to d4d™ and see if there’s anything else that needs blocking still. Now I’m happy with how the script is working (oh, and the reason it wasn’t working was because PHP spells referrer differently to how it should be spelt, and I tend to hand-write my code rather than using a muppets guide… Arsenuggets.) I can block out some other things if they’re pissing me off with how much bandwidth they’re hogging. But I think that removing Google’s image search is going to be the biggest saver going.

UPDATED : Yay, it’s now all gone from the referrers. To coin a phrase, “I love it when a plan comes together”.

Frustration – Fixed

Ha! Got it sorted.

Now, I could just send anything from Google Images to a simple “Page not found” error, or I could do a nice explanatory page. What do you think I should go for?

Oh, and if anyone else is interested in blocking Google Images totally, let me know. So long as you’re comfortable adding in a bit of PHP code to your page (I’m not sure how well it would work in (for example) blogger pages yet) then email me and I’ll see what I can do.

Frustration

Every so often, I get annoyed with PHP because somewhere along the line it’s not doing what I want.

Currently I’m working on barring a certain google image search which is screwing me over bandwidth-wise, and I’m getting about 30-40 hits per day from it. It’s all coming via google itself, rather than being a link out – the page first displays the “image” (which was never actually on the site, I just linked to it) and then in a frameset shows “where the image is on the original page”. At which point it downloads my full archive page. Which is – needless to say – bloody big.

So I’m trying to find a way to stop it from doing so, and at the moment I’m really not succeeding. In theory it should be working, but it’s not doing so.

So I’m pissed off.

CSS – minor bits

For a while now (OK, since the redesign) the comments box has been playing silly fuckers for people using IE. Basically, the comments box was too wide, and slipped under the column on the right, which meant people couldn’t see what they were typing in that section. Kind of unhelpful.

I think I’ve now fixed the problem. But I’d appreciate any feedback from anyone who still uses the piece of crap known as IE to let me know if the problem still exists.

Well, really to know on anything significant if there’s problems in their particular browser.