Book #8

 These books are in the order in which they were picked up from the floor which is the usual repository during coding sessions.

 This is a great PHP primer and an even better reference for those odd functions that don't get used much.  In conjunction with the http://www.php.net/ website you're pretty much covered as far as PHP is concerned although I do have another PHP reference which I will reveal as we go along.

Unprotected Spidering

The life of a spider can be a challenge, blindly sticking your head into places that contains who knows what and wanting to live through it.  I rely on AVG Free Edition to protect me from infection when I contact those virus laden sites and it regularly does its job to a tee.

So far AVG has performed flawlessly, protecting me from literally thousands of exposures and I couldn't be happier. 

Book #9

These books are in the order in which they were picked up from the floor which is the usual repository during coding sessions.

A very quick guide to the SQL language but it contains 90% of the fingertip reference data I need.  If I can't quickly find it here I have another reference that will have it.

242 pages * $16.99 * 2004

Really Dumb

Regarding the hot topic of recent days, the downsizing of the United States Post Office services.  It's hardly a surprise what with the advent of email, instant messaging and a plethora mindless, real time virtual babble sites such as twitter and Facebook.  What is a surprise is the post office's response to falling income, namely increasing first class postage.  So they raise the price and SOME of the people who still used the mail no longer do and the income drops.  So they raise the price and SOME of the people who still used the mail no longer do and the income drops. So they raise the price and SOME of the people who still used the mail no longer do and the income drops.  See a pattern here?

But when was the junk mail rates last increased?  I know junk mail is by far the largest share of my my mail.  And why can junk mail even be sent? Junk mail is sent because it is a profit area for the post office and let me assure you, the minute they figure out how to make money from it, your email will be overrunning with spam.

Granular Web

Funny thing, thinking in terms of a granular web, but it's true, the web is granular.  The web is no different than all the non-virtual cities, each having it's own unique neighborhoods with their individual flavors.  At least that's how this spider perceives it.

I believe it has a lot to do with the old human saying, "Birds of a Feather..." as expressed by links from one web site to others perceived as being important or relevant and of course the extreme expression of that are the directory sights.

A recent outing might serve as a good example.  I was scuttling along the web in NW Ohio visiting mostly Chamber of Commerce sites when  I ran into a huge group of gay bar sites and after a few hundred sites, I scuttled into another, different, neighborhood.

It's hard not to think about web sites being co-located because that is the natural order of the world, but of course, I mostly have no idea of the relationship of any given website to its real world location.  This is due in a large part to a lack of position data in the html code, which is getting better by way of the Geo Tag.

Part of my recent tune up was to allow me to track location by using the meta geo tags and also the tags popularity in the real world web. I don't even want to get into the geo location debate, but if you're interested, I found this site that generates the requisite tags. http://www.geo-tag.de/generator/en.html

This is not a recommendation, just the first site I found that did the job.  The site generated the following tags for my location:
 

<meta name="geo.region" content="US-FL" />
<meta name="geo.placename" content="Naples" />
<meta name="geo.position" content="26.27562;-81.770596" />
<meta name="ICBM" content="26.27562, -81.770596" />
 

In the shop

Hey, I'm in the shop so I have loads of time to ponder the mysteries of the web.  Oh, I'm getting a bunch of upgrades, new tags to track and stuff like that. Although I am a modular class spider it always seems that once the modules are assembled there is always a bit of tweaking to do.

Hope to be back online soon.

Disallow: /

As a spider, I have to say it's great when I get that odd micro-second to kick back and enjoy a cold one in a private corner of my web.  But, when I can download, digest and store a web page in a retrievable manner in an average of 0.8 seconds, a wait of  five minutes is intolerable.  You know I'm talking about the very popular crawl-delay attribute of the robots.txt protocol.

First, it is important to know the crawl-delay attribute is not an official member of the  Robots Exclusion Protocol ( aka robots.txt protocol) which means compliance with a crawl-delay request is entirely at the discretion of the user agent.  To foster a warm fuzzy feeling in our relationship, I observe the crawl-delay attribute, to a limit.  However, I will not delay for more than 1 second.