More Zonkyness

Tag: Web

  • MSN Robot Has A Bug ??

    So a few days ago I was idly looking at the “StatPress” page on my site to look how few people were visiting to see something rather surprising :-

    Graph of accesses

    What was happening here ? Have I been slashdotted ? Is my income from those silly ads down the side going to shoot through the roof to a level worth letting a certain company send me the payments ?

    No. Nothing so exciting. All (well, the overwhelming majority) were from an MSN robot – presumably indexing this site. Well fair enough, but why so many accesses ? It is not as if my site has much on it – nowhere near the nearly 100,000 page fetches they tried. A closer look at the Apache logs shows that the msn robot repeatedly fetched many pages including one page 1,300 times!

    Sounds like Microsoft has a bug somewhere.

  • An Alternative Way Of Finding “Hot” Websites

    It just occurred to me that there’s a somewhat different way of finding the latest and hottest new websites out there – just take a look in CPAN (Perl’s third-party library repository) or the equivalent for other languages for modules that match “WebService”.

    If someone has gone to the trouble of writing a module for communicating with a site, it probably is at least worth looking at.