Monitoring Dalager

Disclaimer: Buckle up for some tech or hit your back button.

In Using Firebird as a Power Tool I showed how to use the keyword feature in the Firebird browser to interface with external website tools.

But if you have the skills to write small scripts in PHP, Perl, ASP, JSP or any other scripting language you can do serious stuff.

Here goes:

I extended my referer script with a filter file listing domains that should be excluded from my referers (as a response to fake weblogs and other referer spam)

However, this list should be easy to maintain — the adding and removing of domains should be so easy as possible, and I found that an administrative web frontend would be overkill, requiring too many steps which in turn would keep me from using it.

The solution: write a simple script like addToIgnoreList and use firebird as a command-line interface. This is php but it should be easy to grasp the idea and port it to other scripting languages.

Standard invocation of the script works like this:
 adding: http://mydomain/myadmin/addToIgnoreList.php?action=add&&domain=http://evildomain.com
 removing: http://mydomain/myadmin/addToIgnoreList.php?action=remove&domain=http://evildomain.com

Now the firebird:

1. Make two bookmarks to the script - one for adding and one for removing
2. add keywords to the bookmark (in my case i chose ‘ban’ and ‘unban’)
3. replace http://evildomain.com with ‘%s’

Of course you put your script in a password protected directory…
And the filter-file should have the correct write permissions (chmod 644 should do ?)

This is just a simple example of using the address-line of Firebird as an administrative interface:

ban http://evildomain.com — adds the domain to my ignore list.
unban http://evildomain.com — removes the domain.

Statement: There is no need to cook up complex solutions for simple tasks.

Dette indlæg blev skrevet Saturday, 22. November 2003 kl. 5:48 og er gemt i Teknologi. Du kan følge kommentarerne til indlægget via følgende feed RSS 2.0. Du kan springe ned til slutningen og efterlade en kommentar. Pinging er ikke tilladt i øjeblikket.