Referrer spam on this site is increasing daily. Until now I use a two-step method to block them, even though I don’t publish my referrers. First of all, I maintain a list of used domain names. I check my referrers every day, and add newly found domains to the list. If a visitor uses one of these domains as referrer, the request is automatically blocked, and the IP address of the visitor is automagically put on a second list, making sure that future visits will be blocked as well. IP addresses stay on the list for one month, to make sure the size of the list does not get out of hand.

I noticed that the domains on my list are all mentioned in the MT-Blacklist. So those referrer spammers are also comment spammers. MT-Blacklist is updated automatically from the clearinghouse, so needs less maintenance. It would be nice to be able to combine the two methods right?

Today I found derefspam.pl, a script to use the MT-Blacklist to remove referrer spam from your server log files. At first thought I wanted to install it, but then I realized that all this script does is throw away information, so it won’t pollute your statistics. Since I want to be able to see what really happened on my server, I prefer not to throw away this information. After all, these requests have consumed some bandwidth… A thought was to implement a script for each request, but I am sure that this will slow down my site too much, since database requests take time… For the moment I stick with my two lists, and hope that spamming will decrease soon.

Copied from Zezunja: Joga from Björk.

It is amazing how many talented people there are. And many of them closer to you than you can imagine!

Yesterday we went to see EnFado in the city concert hall. EnFado is a quartet playing traditional portuguese fado music. The concert yesterday was given in co-operation with dancers of the citie's dance school, which gave the performance more to see. Between the songs they explained what fado is, and where it comes from.

The hall was completely filled, mainly with family and friends of the performers. Though I know them personally, I had never visited a concert before, and I have to admit that I liked it very much. Not that I am going to be a big fado fan from now on, but I was certainly enjoying the concert. Carol, the singer is such a personality on stage; she looks very comfortable standing on stage and doing her thing.

It wouldn't surprise me if we will visit a concert of EnFado again.

For people who don’t know where Lleida is: it lies about 160 km south-west of Barcelona, in the centre of the Segre valley, surrounded by hills. These hills make that Lleida usually is free of wind, which has great influence on the weather in Lleida.

In summer, the lack of wind makes it 5-10°C hotter than e.g. Barcelona, with weeks of 40°C. The inhabitants prefer to spend their free time in the nearby pyrenees or beaches, which have a more pleasant temperature. As a result, Lleida turns into an empty ghost town in summer.

In winter, the lack of wind together with the lower temperatures create a dense fog, which stays for many days. At this moment we haven’t seen a single ray of sun during almost two weeks. The frustrating of the fog is that is is very local. 20km outside of Lleida, in any direction, the sun is shining each day, and the temperature is 15-20° higher! Every day the news shows a clear wheather map, with one small white dot about 160 km south-west of Barcelona. :-(

We desperately want a little bit of wind, which will blow away the fog and show us that the sun still exists. If not, we will leave town in the weekend to get some sun and leave Lleida as a ghost town just like in summer.

To enjoy the Three Kings tomorrow: Sunburn from Muse.

Tomorrow will be the day that many Dutch blogs will show the special action page. The list of participating bloggers is getting bigger and bigger, and includes some prominent bloggers. You can read all about it on the action page.

Today I received the instructions, which consist of simply replacing the index.html page with the action page. This won’t work for Movable Type blogs, since MT will overwrite the index.html page when a comment is posted to an entry. Furthermore, I wanted the page to show up for all requests, since many visitors enter the site through Google, and won’t see the home page. And finally, I am a lazy person, so I want this to happen automagically.

Therefore I uploaded the file as actie.html and changed my .htaccess file to (temporary) redirect all requests for html pages to the action page. I used the following code:

RewriteEngine on RewriteBase / RewriteCond %{TIME_YEAR}%{TIME_MON}%{TIME_DAY} >20050105 RewriteCond %{TIME_YEAR}%{TIME_MON}%{TIME_DAY} <20050107 RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} index.s?html$ RewriteRule ^(.*) /actie.html [L,R]

Furthermore I hace changed the action page a little bit. The page basically consisted of a table-based layout, with a single image showing the text. For once I won’t complain about table-based layout, since we are working for a good cause, and I value the work they have put into this project. But I did take the freedom to add an alternative text to the image, so that visitors that cannot see the image also know what is going on.

Some nice music: Iron Flower from K’s Choice.

My good ol' club Jong Nederland has a new site, based on the Mambo Open Source (MOS) CMS. The old site was based on home-brew PHP, and desperately needed a change.

It looks like they have the basic functionality up and running in MOS, but in my opinion they need to work a little bit more on the design. I am sure that they will fix it, since it already looks better than this morning. Of course the horrible “Designed for Internet Explorer” disclaimer has to go!!!

Further tips to make the site better:

• Knowing the amount of events Jong Nederland has, it would be better to present an event list instead of a calendar;
• Mambo has a nice option to create friendly URL's, which only needs some changes to the .htaccess file;
• The section pages should be more descriptive and at least contain links to the sub-sections to make browsing easier. I had to look twice before I noticed the extra options in the menu;
• Jong Nederland has a huge collection of drawings and logo's, but these are not used at all in the articles. I want Kleppie and Molly Mol!!!

As a regular contributor to the old guestbook, I need to browse my old JN stuff to find my membership number, so I can access the new forum.

The year of the rooster has officially begun. I wish everybody all the best and a lot of love in this year. May all your wishes come through!!!