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Behind The Firm List Blog
Spiders, Bots, Tiles & Other Oddities
Okay, it's been a while since I last made an entry here. A lot has taken place since I
last wrote, including buying a condo, moving in, Xmas vacation, freelance web work, unpacking and laying a tile floor.
Quite a mouthful, eh?
So today, I was laying a tile floor and when I came up to check my email, I notice that I have 1,300 new email messages.
Wow! I've never had that much before (I said to myself), especially for just a few hour span. I had 700+ emails when I
came back from a week's vacation, what caused this?
(a quick aside to say I have switched from DSL to a Cable Modem, and I have been happy (so far) and probably those 1,300
email messages would have taken twice the time to download as well)
Upon closer inspection, I notice that all 1,300 of those messages (okay, two were spam) were generated by my automated
broken link detection script. With closer scrutiiny, I notice that a program/spider/bot named Wget was the source of all
of these broken link instances. To add further insult to injury, they weren't even truly broken images, rather the
Wget couldn't understand properly handle the symbolic links I had set up (don't ask me how this is possible).
(A further fact, all 1,300 broken link instances (one email per instance) were generated in the span of 4 minutes. Is that
a World's Record?)
So, this Wget seems to be one of those tools for mirroring/copying a website, you can download it here.
Does this mean someone was copying one of my websites?
Anyways, enough of that weirdness. I just wanted to let everyone know I am well behind in updates and additions to the site. I
will get to them as soon as possible. Please bear with me. And I hope everyone has a happy holidays.
