Movable Type’s just been updated, so I’m backing things up in preparation to do the upgrade.  It’s not complicated at all; I’m not worried about losing any data, but I like to cover my ass just in case.

They’ve updated the default RSS templates too… I really REALLY need to go over my RSS output files and see if they look and behave even remotely the way I want.  For the people who are reading the feed, I would love it if you could come to my site and comment on how you’d like to see it formatted.  Do you prefer full entries or partial, or both?  And pictures?  I just don’t know. I guess I want to offer two feeds, one barebones and the other with everything.  I have to tweak this, I’ve barely looked at them in NetNewsWire except just to confirm that they worked.

Speaking of tweaking, in my obsessive examination of my weblogs I ran across another egregious bandwidth offender. Now… I really love Fark, I read it every day.  But some asshat on their message boards hotlinked one of my images — just a teeny thumbnail, but still.  They get a LOT of traffic so it’s added up to be one of the most requested images on my site.  I can’t even find it in their message boards; there are just too many postings, and the exact URL isn’t indicated in the referrer string. My new .htaccess file disallows remote linking, but I kept seeing their failed requests in my logs and it pissed me off.  So I made a new image that will henceforth be called up whenever a picture on this server is used on another site.  VERY cute of me, huh?

I’m just worried I’m shooting myself in the foot somehow.  Like maybe I hotlinked one of my own images in some profile on some web-board out there.  Somebody’ll go look at my profile and I’ll look like an idiot… "Hey everybody, she’s a thief! Stealing from herself!" But I guess I can find out if that happens by looking at the logs.  Ugh. I’m so sick of looking at my logs.

There was a great comment on the forum at WebmasterWorld… "Some people like to do crossword puzzles; we like to play with .htaccess files." Or words to that effect.  Too true!!  You could drive yourself nuts looking at weblogs, trying to figure out who the robots are and writing rules to keep them out.  I’m just relieved I finally woke up to the problem and (hopefully) succeeded in taking some basic steps to protect myself in the future.  I don’t want to spend much time worrying about it, but I want to do whatever I can to conserve my bandwidth for my intended audience — real humans and well-behaved search engines.  How would I even know if I locked somebody out that I didn’t mean to?  Gawd.  I just hope somebody will let me know if there’s a problem so I can get it fixed ASAP.