Dead Links

 Technology  1 Response »
Dec 092009
 

In the gen­er­al spir­it of tidy­ing up before the Christmas/New Year peri­od I used a link check­er on my blog (Integ­rity on the Mac, I’ve also used Xenu on Win­dows). And dis­covered a bunch of 404s. Some were to sites that still exist but either reor­gan­ized without set­ting up 301 redir­ects, or deleted the con­tent I linked to. Some were to sites that don’t exist any more. I guess part of the price I pay for being part of the spi­der­net that is the web is mak­ing sure my little bit of it is reas­on­ably tidy, so I’ll be delet­ing dead links (though not con­tent) over the next little while. This does raise the issue of the con­tent in cases where I may have referred to, say, a busi­ness that does­n’t exist any more. I’m think­ing I’ll make a small note in cases where it seems to mat­ter, with the determ­in­a­tion of “seems to mat­ter” being some­what arbitrary.

I installed and activ­ated the WP Minor Edit plu­gin for Word­Press and will mark all these changes as minor, so this should­n’t lead to the Atom feed being discombobulated.

lynx and mod_security

 Technology, WordPress  2 Responses »
Dec 072009
 

I’ve been imple­ment­ing more web sites recently; it appears to be one part of the tech­no­logy mar­ket for which there is still demand. One of the things I push when I meet with cli­ents is access­ib­il­ity, so I figured I should test my own sites and make sure they’re reas­on­ably access­ible. Lynx is one tool to use to check access­ib­il­ity (as well as being a good basic text-based browser). I was a little flum­moxed when I got back a 406 http error, which usu­ally means the user agent can­’t read the char­ac­ter set, lan­guage, or encod­ing the web site uses. Even the most basic text html page was rejected.

It turned out that my ISP had mod_security enabled (good) and con­figured in such a way that lynx was banned (not so good). Ban­ning lynx seems to be a fal­lout from a quick way of con­fig­ur­ing mod_security by fil­ter­ing out keywords that might be used in hack­ing attempts. Per­son­ally I can­’t see the point as lynx can be told to use a dif­fer­ent user agent string if need be, and people who want to hack your site will likely know how to do that, and I can­’t under­stand how people use lynx to hack a site either. Mind you, I don’t hack oth­er people’s web sites, so I don’t know the tools people use who do. Any­way, the ISP cheer­fully took out the fil­ter caus­ing the prob­lem, but in the mean­time my IP address had been flagged by mod_security for try­ing to bypass the fil­ter too many times, so I was com­pletely banned from my own site, as well as every oth­er site that hap­pens to be hos­ted on the same server. 

Even­tu­ally we cleared up that little prob­lem as well, and I could get back to tweak­ing my style-sheets and HTML to be more access­ible. There’s a bit more to do yet, but I’m get­ting there. And I’m grate­ful for an assidu­ous ISP (Cana­dian Web Host­ing) with a sup­port team that works late on Fri­day nights.

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