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.

Monday, September 24, 2007

It's really been over ten years since I wrote “An Extended Standard for Robot Exclusion”? Wow …

Around the same time the IETF draft was being discussed, Sean “Captain Napalm” Connor [sic] proposed his own extension to the Robots Exclusion Protocol, which included Allow rules as well as regular expression syntax for rules, and new Robot-version, Visit-time, Request-rate, and Comment rules. Less than 100 of the sites I visited use rules unique to this spec.

Via email from Steve Smith, robots.txt Adventure

[As a small aside, I don't know why people insist on spelling my last name with an “O-R” instead of an “E-R”. It's not like I misppelled my own name on that page. Sigh. —Editor]

That's not the only place “An Extended Standard for Robot Exclusion” has been referenced—it's also mentioned in O'Reilly's HTTP: The Definitive Guide, but until Steve reminded me of it, I basically forgot about it. Understandable since the last time it was edited was November of 2002 (and even then, the previous time it was edited was six years earlier—it's old).

This probably means it's time once again to check the links and make sure they all work.

And maybe clean up the HTML while I'm at it.

Just as soon as I can reproduce that insipid Heisenbug.

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[The future's so bright, I gotta wear shades]

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You have my permission to link freely to any entry here. Go ahead, I won't bite. I promise.

The dates are the permanent links to that day's entries (or entry, if there is only one entry). The titles are the permanent links to that entry only. The format for the links are simple: Start with the base link for this site: https://boston.conman.org/, then add the date you are interested in, say 2000/08/01, so that would make the final URL:

https://boston.conman.org/2000/08/01

You can also specify the entire month by leaving off the day portion. You can even select an arbitrary portion of time.

You may also note subtle shading of the links and that's intentional: the “closer” the link is (relative to the page) the “brighter” it appears. It's an experiment in using color shading to denote the distance a link is from here. If you don't notice it, don't worry; it's not all that important.

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