The Boston Diaries

The ongoing saga of a programmer who doesn't live in Boston, nor does he even like Boston, but yet named his weblog/journal “The Boston Diaries.”

Go figure.

Tuesday, November 28, 2006

A request

From
Spring Dew <XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX>
To
"Sean 'Captain Napalm' Conner" <sean@conman.org>
Subject
googling
Date
Tue, 28 Nov 2006 16:19:55 -0500

Hi honey. I was looking for Bicycle World's website, and tried to Google things like:

Lots of Yellow Pages listings, but no results for the actual website. I finally found the site by going to

http://www.wildernessenergy.com/retail_locations_florida.html

and getting the link from there.

Most of the pages on their site don't have much for keywords or description; most don't mention Florida. But if you were to link to

http://bicycleworldonline.com/page.cfm?PageID=12

do you think Google might pick up the result? That page actually has place names in it. The home page doesn't.

Working backwards, the only way I could find it was to Google for results directly from that URL. Heh.

Certainly I'll link to that page. But it's iffy if Google will index the page. It depends upon the sites robots.txt file, if there are any appropriate <META> tags on the page, and will Google spider a site that is most likely the output from a CGI program (that can have bad consequences—infinite loops, lost data, etc.).

But it can't hurt to try.

Today's issue

Nothing worse than trying to debug FTP issues in the presense of firewalls.

FTP is a really old protocol that due to the way it works, makes it difficult to support properly when there are firewalls at both the client side and the server side, primarily because by default, whenever the server wants to send data to the client, the server initiates a connection back to the client. Sure, there's passive mode, but that just means that the server tells the client to connect on a different (and usually blocked) port on the server for the data.

It's especially frustrating when these things suddenly stop working.

Grrrrr.

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