went there, did that

sorabji.com: Surfwatch: went there, did that
THIS IS A READ-ONLY ARCHIVE FROM THE SORABJI.COM MESSAGE BOARDS (1995-2016).
By Sorabji on Thursday, January 22, 1998 - 10:47 pm:
    that lewinski person either knew all this was coming or she is positively mortified by all this.

    i was looking forward to this being the week of the pope meeting castro. instead it is a footnote. not that the press is any barometer of what really matters, but it's been tough getting any information at all about the event.

    anyway, this story would have made an interesting afterthought to a vastly meaningful week.

    days earlier, i accidentally re-discovered The Road to Nowhere, sort of an interesting little place which doesn't look like it gets updated much.

    i actually spent a few minutes last week exploring robots.txt files of the big, fat, huge websites. robots.txt files are the files which search engines look for so they can know what parts of a website not to index. to look at it another way, these are the files which tell you where the good stuff is.

    for instance, the CNN robots.txt file leads one to the such jewels as the CNN.com webmaster logs, (this link chokes MSIE 3.0) freely available to the world except for one internal frame. this page shows you how the CNN servers are doing, in case you care.

    Usually, though, robots files are pretty innocuous. Take abcnews.com. very lame.

    From the the Yahoo robots file we learn that Roverbot is a bad seed. I never even heard of it.

    What I've always wondered, though, is why my robots.txt file gets almost all its hits from dial-up slip and ppp customers? you'd think only bots and machines and search crawlers of loving grace would care about these files, but perhaps there are others like me out here on dialup.

    You can also, if you have aboslutely nothing else to do, find interesting pages by typing in "index2.html" or "test.html" or "index.test.html" or something like that after your favorite domain name.

    Web types are so predictable.
By R.C. on Friday, January 23, 1998 - 12:13 am:
    The Vatican piece was interesting -- Thanks. It reminded me of a book I read years ago & have been looking for ever since (I want to option the movie rights). It's been out of print forever/but it dealt/in part/with spontaneous combustion & demonic forces. It was purportedly a true story. Part of it dealt with a murder trial. During the trial/a Papal edict was obtained to unseal a document that had been under lock & key at the Vatican for hundreds of years. The document was a musical score -- an invocation to Satan. A musicologist testified that if sung or played/the meoldy was supposed to cause a demon to appear & do one's your bidding. (The person on trial had been videotaped in her jail cell singing this tune to herself. How could she have possibly learned it -- other than from a demon -- when no one had seen the score in ages? But they played it in the courtroom & nothing happened. Until later...) I've spent half my life wondering what that piece of music must have sounded like... Now that I have the Web at my fingertips/I'm going to try & locate that book & see what info I can track down on that score. Maybe Mark will play it for us....

By R.C. on Friday, January 23, 1998 - 12:58 am:
    And what are all those "Disallow" msgs. on those robot files anyway? Does that mean if I were searching for 'bad dogs' or 'Roverbot'/then the engine wouldn't be allowed to give me that URL?
By Christop.com on Tuesday, April 7, 1998 - 07:36 pm:
    it's surprising how few of the generally creative and painfully web-savvy folk out there have bothered to put robots.txt files up, yet alone put anything subversive in them.

    my favourite so far is benicetobears.

    this gave me a chuckle.
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