Month: December 2003

Two questions in my referrer logs this morning: first, that age-old Monty Python-inspired one, “tell me again how sheep’s bladders may be used to prevent earthquakes”. I think, if we can calculate the air-speed velocity of an unladen swallow, someone ought to finally be able to answer this one. Does anyone have a sheep’s bladder handy?

And the second question, which I don’t believe is Python-inspired, is “what has been the most surprising challenging interesting disappointing tedious confusing or memorable dimension of your study in this course”? Please be as concise as possible. This will count for half your grade.

While I had to do it through Network Solutions (and it’s a little suspicious in that I think they’d let anybody with a credit card do it), I’ve renewed this domain for another three years. This, following an e-mail response from my hosting company, who lets me know if I want to transfer the domain, I’ll have to try again in sixty days. Since my main objective was simply not to lose the domain, I can deal with that.

I’m currently downloading a backup of my entire website, just in case my domain renewal doesn’t go through as planned. Hopefully, it will, but I’m having some difficulty and, officially, the domain appears to still be expired. So you never know…

For the past two or three weeks, I’ve been getting the same search query over and over in my referrer logs. Day in, day out, it’s always there. Today, there were four hits. In the past, there have been eight or nine. Which is surprising, since this phrase most definitely does not appear anywhere on my website. (I won’t say what that phrase is, since that would probably just increase the hits, but I will say it’s disturbingly pornographic and involves a not particularly healthy love of family.) I can’t figure out why it keeps showing up. If it’s yet another form of referrer spam, it’s not very good spam. I doubt anyone’s generating hits for their website by creating fake anonymous search queries to mine. And the alternative, that someone out there is so desperate for this sort of link that they’ll come to my website just to see the words in close proximity to one another (and they’ll do so over and over again), doesn’t seem altogether likely either. I don’t know that I want to do this, but is there any way to block specific search referrals?