jclark.org/weblog

Odds and Ends

It’s been a busy week, but I’ve managed to find time for a little recreational computing here and there. Here’s the latest on some of my recent entries.

• My WordPress conversion is largely completed. I still need to get a comments Atom feed set up, and I’d still like to tag some of my pre-conversion posts, but I’m otherwise nearly done.

• I still haven’t quite gotten tag pages working as I want, but I’ve got it working with redirects, for now.

• I’m still making little tweaks to Tranquility, the WordPress theme I created for the site, as well as some of the meta parts of the site. I haven’t finished the About or Colophon pages yet, but I did get the Licence page finished, and a number of minor display tweaks made.

• I replaced my lousy V5 WRT54G with a $30 refurbished V1.1 and a copy of OpenWRT White Russian RC5, which rocks.

• The one thing I’ve always wanted from my router has been DNS resolution of my DHCP host names; none of the Linksys firmwares across two models of router have done it, and neither did the last version of Sveasoft I tried (the last before the subscription fiasco). Works perfectly with OpenWRT; with a quick edit to the device’s /etc/hosts file, my static IP machines (my server, and the router itsself) also now have DNS-resolvable names.

• Less than a week after I fixed my page titles, Google has reindexed most of them, so now my search hits have titles again.

• Technorati is still showing lots of bad links from my test site, which is 410 Gone.

• I still need to write up my Blosxom to WordPress conversion method, which I promised to do. Hopefully by next weeked.

Getting Unnoticed

While I was working on the conversion, I setup a sub-domain at testbed.jclark.org. Unfortunately, I forgot to disable pings, and my testbed site ended up pinging something (pingomatic, I think). Google indexed the test site, and Technorati climbed all over it. Technorati found a special hacked version of my old blosxom site that contained links to the real site (jclark.org), so now my technorati inbound links page is full of posts from the test site that linked to me. Since this is now a dead site, I didn’t want it indexed by any search engine.

As soon as I figured out what happened, I killed testbed.jclark.org with a .htaccess mod_rewrite rule that makes every URI on the site return 410 Gone. After a few days, nothing had changed. A little research revealed how to get removed from Google. In short, I added a robots.txt file disallowing all User Agents (I could have disallowed only Googlebot). To hasten the process, I used the url removal system to request an expedited check of my robots.txt file. I also had to modify my mod_rewrite rules to serve robots.txt, since I was sending 410 for every request. Within a day, the test site was gone from Google.

Getting delisted from Technorati has proven more difficult. I’ve been unable to find any instructions on the website. I tried using the ping form to have some posts re-spidered, knowing they would return a 410, but no change so far. I sent an email to support about a week ago, to which I’ve received no reply. A day later, all of the posts had dissapeared, only to return hours later. If anyone knows how to get delisted, please leave me a comment.