Flashes of Panic

I’ve been weeding on two different levels for the last few days. Weeding: v., to remove that considered to have little or no value for the benefit of that with greater value.

For one thing, having managed the exchange of iPods, I’ve had to re-populate a song list. I wish I had discovered PodWorks sooner, because then I might have retained some valuable metadata from “10”, specifically ratings, before I wiped it. Instead, I’m now playing through my library again, re-rating as I go. This is fun on one level, because I am hearing some stuff I haven’t heard much of, and some things I hadn’t given a proper chance before. On the other hand, in order to fit as much on “10” as I had, I had deleted a lot of things I had given low ratings to. I have a bigger catalog available, but the average quality (as perceived by me) has actually gone down.

I’m not too worried about that, in the long run, because the flexibility afforded by more space is worth it. I have some elaborate playlists set up to favor songs I rate highly, so as rating approaches completion the quality should go up.

At the same time, like several other folks, I’ve been making another push to trim spammed referrers out of my server logs. They’ve been a real nuisance lately, and instead of the one-or-two here-or-there approach they used to take, we’re getting hit with fifteen or twenty (or fifty) per day in an effort to be “Biggest referrer” instead of just a “recent referrer.”

So, I’m taking more drastic measures. Mostly, that has taken the shape of Dorothea’s massive Referer regexp, to which I have added and removed a few things. (For instance, I think a simple match on “teen” is too broad a brush.) I also attempted the recommended mod_rewrite hack for bogus requests, but that doesn’t work on my site, I think due to some sort of server issue; it rejects everyone, not just the bogus requests, which is frustrating.

As a result of this, and to follow Dorothea’s lead in sharing information, I’m going to keep a cleaned-up copy of the .htaccess file for this site available for the morbidly curious. You can see who I’m blocking referrals from by visiting htaccess.txt on this server.

Now Playing: My Dark Side from Still Burning by Mike Scott