Custom 404 page edited.

Its taken me all weekend, but I have now edited my 404 page. I’m not that slow a coder – the time has included a very slow download and reinstallation of Foxserv after I broke my apache’s httpd.conf file when fiddling with it to get a custom 404 page on the laptop installation that I am testing with.
Now my 404 page does not send me a notification email if someone is using a hacking script to scan for formmail and ends up at my 404 page. Its been quite a good exercise in coding as I’ve used server variables to obtain the requested web page and the refererring page, Regular expressions to check that its not some variant of formmail and a couple of if statements to do the logic. This is the best way to learn php with a (small) project to do something useful on the website.

An end to suffering

It will be a lot easier to be a chef from today as Teso’s are selling a tear-free onion from today. Not genetically modified it should have half the tear-inducing ingredients! Sounds great – just hope it tastes good. I actually thought I wouldn’t need something like this after watching Gos on Big Brothers Little Brother when he demonstrated how to chop an onion, because the next time I chopped an onion I did it the same way and had no problems with the stinging sensation – although not so on Friday night when my eyes were really sore.

T3 – a mini review

Just got back from watching Terminator 3 – the loudest film I’ve seen ever. The noise of the “car” chase was amazing and you could feel the vibrations in the seat. A very good film and worth watching although there are several plot points that were very dodgy and we spotted at least one continuity problem concerning cars and a restaurant – I won’t go into any more detail so it doesn’t ruin it for the people who haven’t seen it yet. Looking at the queue when we came out of the cinema I am so glad that we didn’t go to see the 8pm showing as it was packed!
Update I’ve added the blooper to Movie Bloopers

Netcrafts WebServer survey 8th birthday

From Netcrafts survey, the first Web Server Survey ran in August 1995 and found 18,957 sites. NCSA and CERN were the leading web servers of the day, in front of Netscape which had recently IPO’d, and the Apache project which started a few months earlier in March 1995. Microsoft-IIS, HTTP/1.1 hosting and domain name registrars were not then on the horizon.

In the August 2003 survey we received responses from 42,807,275 sites.
(My first domain appeared in March 1999) although I was using geocities a longtime before that.

Formmail and php

Having access to a customised 404 page means I’ve been able to set up notification when someone goes to a missing page on my site and I can then correct the links. Its a practise thats worked well and I now get very few error messages coming in. However I am getting several links for various incarnations of formmail.cgi, formmail.php, and formmail.pl all in different locations such as /cgi-bin, / etc. All of them have had the referral page forged so it looks like its my site that has led them to this page (presumably because thats one of the first restrictions someone will use to lock down their mailing routine). I now have to do some more php work with those regex expressions learnt yesterday to not email me if someone requests a formmail page of whatever description. Ideally I’d want to put them in my .htaccess file programatically too so they wouldnt be able to get any more pages (or make them refer to a tarpit of some kind)