General site weblog

I’m doing a bit of research – well a lot of research really – about various bots and how to keep the bad ones out of my site.

Apart from stealing content from the site, bots can have a serious and adverse effect on bandwidth, running it through the roof at times. Which in turn can have a costly effect on the site. Although the blog pages have spambot protection – there are other types of bot that can cause problems as well.

So I want to try n implement as much bot protection as I can without affecting genuine visitors to the site. Fortunately there appears to be a plethora of info and advice out there, I just need to trawl through it to find effective protection for the site. Even if I end up having to pay for a piece of software it could in the long run be valuable.

Most decent robots will read and obey the ‘htaccess’ file and robots.txt file – only the bad ones will ignore these instructions, even some legit bots will try and circumnavigate the robots.txt. So I need to try and bone up on what to put in that txt file. Also find out what I can implement safely via the ‘htaccess’ file as well.

Anyway, I’ve found some very useful sites, and copied the various ways of combating bots, and saved them as text files. Also saved a whole web page on this subject too. Will try and read and digest them at a later date, tomorrow if I can.

One in particular does have a very concise way of trapping bots, so I think I’ll have a look at that first because it makes fun of the bots and gives them a lot of work to do, while not affecting the server.

Gonna be a long trawl…….

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I’ve found out how to add an icon to the browser tab – like other sites such eBay etc.

I had to edit 3 different places with associated files to get this working with my main site, webstore and blogs. Each treated the way to display the icon differently.

now you should see an icon like this in the tabs sites.or url address bar of your browser when you visit either of the 3

I’ve tested this in the following browsers:

Google Chrome – listed first because it’s the best!
Safari
Firefox – good but it’s so slow compared to Google Chrome and Safari.

Don’t know what happens in Internet Explorer because I don’t have access to a copy as I use a Apple MacBook Pro – so tough!

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I’ve been doing a little housekeeping work on the site. For one thing, I’ve deleted a lot of extraneous unneeded file off the server, eg:

WordPress theme folders and files that I’m never going to use.
Loads of redundant image files that I only used in setting up various parts of the site.

etc etc

This has helped to free up some space on the server, don’t know how much, but every little helps I suppose.

Site Structure and operation:
Another thing I’ve done is to alter the way each of the 3 site modules relate and work with each other:

• Main site pages
• Blog pages
• Online shop

I’ve removed the coding that forced blog pages to be opened in a new tab. Now they open in the same tab, and I’ve inserted navigation links in the header of the blog pages that link back to the main blogs page. Also on the blog page header I’ve inserted a link to the online shop – now all the site modules are linked in together – well almost.

Next thing I want to do is put a simple “Back” button on the webstore navigation bar – so the visitor gets taken back to the page they were on before accessing the shop. I’m also going to put a link to the main blog page too, so the blogs can be accessed directly from the shop too. I may even include links to the Guestbook and Calendar pages too, (also might be an idea to include those on the blog pages as well )……….

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I’ve created some pages that give information about myself etc. They are:

About Me Obvious what this does I would think

Vinyl Cleaning A general piece about how I clean my vinyl. I’ve put this up because I’m seriously considering offering a vinyl cleaning service for a reasonable cost. It will include the cleaning of the vinyl, replacement inner sleeve/s, an outer PVC or plastic protection sleeve, postage in a custom protective mailer.

I’m also in the process of creating all the legal pages that cover the running etc of the site – conditions of use, privacy notice, shipping and returns etc. These are the ones that are going to take the most time to construct as I need to ensure that they are ok and pertinent.

Oh I finally got the footer up and running – wasn’t as hard as I thought it was going to be. Once I had copied the relevant file into the override custom directory it was a simple matter of copying and pasting in the code from the footer of another site page. Job done – only took about 20 minutes.

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Ok. ever had one of those days where you work at something to get exactly the result you want – then find that you could have done it better AND easier?

Well that’s the kind of day I’ve just had. I wanted to remove the “Home” page links from ALL pages, plus the related text that follows it. So being a good boy I searched the support site pages for an answer. As per normal – everyone n their dog has a way of doing it, but they all involved manually editing this n that n the other file.

Of course, there’s also a right & wrong way of doing this as far as Zen is concerned. The creators developed a system where you can create custom templates etc so the core files don’t have to be changed. Very important when it comes to upgrade time, when core files get over-written by new ones. Together with this there is also a built in override system that acts the same way as the custom template system. I thought this a very good way of going about things, so set to creating all the requisite directories, files etc to enable me to do it.

Can you appreciate my reaction though when I discovered that to achieve what I wanted – eg remove the “Home” link and attendant text – there was a far easier way actually built into the Zen Cart admin system? I was pretty well pissed off I can tell you!!! All I had to do was go to Configuration>Layout Settings and disable it in there. Remember “breadcrumbs” and breadcrumb trails from my previous post? Thats the setting I had to change……. Oh Boy!

So I’ve learned more about the system – but wasted a lot of time doing so!

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