Penultimate Reality

After playing around with that script I linked earlier, (mostly repairing the damage that it had endured from being blindly posted to a blog), I’ve managed to integrate it into my AWStats system. As a result, the rampant spam bot activity in my stats has more or less disappeared. I can’t be entirely sure that the script hasn’t filtered out a few genuine users, but even so, it makes me feel like those stats are useful again.

Whether or not the stats in themselves are useful is another question altogether. If nothing else, they help the webmaster measure growth and see what pages are popular and which aren’t. It’s how I know that there’s some interest in the phpBB3 version of the Custom Title MOD, despite my not receiving a single comment about it. In any case, it’ll be exciting to be able to actually follow the stats with some semblance of realism now.

One way of measuring traffic at a web site is log analysis software such as AWStats. These sorts of packages read the server logs and generate a variety of tables or graphs allowing a webmaster or server administrator to analyze their traffic and measure growth (or decline). One thing that really hampers such efforts is the wide proliferation of spam bots.

A sizable percentage of my traffic here at Penultimate Reality comes from spam bots. So far as I can tell, I’m essentially being hit by a couple of different kinds of bots. The first is so-called “referer spam”. These bots access a web page, and tell the web server they were referred there from some (usually terrible) spam advertising site. The motives are unclear, as the only person who will ever see these links is me. I suppose they either hope I’ll click on them or that some webmasters publish their stats and thus expose these links to the public. Either way, it seems somewhat dubious. That said, this kind of spam doesn’t affect me a whole lot, though it does show up.

The second (and most prevalent) is “comment spam”. These spam bots troll the internet, looking for blogs, forums, and anything else that allows comments looking to post their spam. (This description attributes far more intelligence to them than they actually have. I imagine they’re actually more specialized to one particular piece of software, but who knows. I haven’t used one.) They either attempt to post spam comments (and as you can see in the right sidebar, I block many thousands of them) or they attempt to use the trackback feature of blogging software. These bots have made my AWStats statistics next-to-useless, because such a large portion of my traffic comes form these bots. The most prolific of them have accessed various URLs hundreds of times this month.

As far as solutions, I’m not entirely sure what to do. One solution is to simply run Google Analytics. These bots rarely execute the JavaScript associated with an external tracker like this, and as such tend not to show up. That said, I prefer a local solution (for whatever reason), and it’d be nice to filter them out of AWStats somehow. I found an interesting script that purports to help solve this problem, but I haven’t actually figured out how the script works, and my perl-fu is decidedly weak at the moment. Even then, I’d have to integrate it somehow into the automated logging and statistics generation.

Are there any solutions I haven’t found or thought of, or is a service like Google Analytics just the best way to go at this point?

(This is the seventh, and final part of a multi-part series. To review the other parts, please visit the Web Design archives.)

At this point, you may feel like you’re finally finished with your site. After all, you’ve got loads of great content, your web site is easily accessible to anyone on the Internet, and the visitors are starting to trickle in. What more could there possibly be? Perhaps unfortunately, quite a bit. Even the best site will eventually fall apart if not properly maintained. For this reason, web sites are rarely the type of thing you can simply set up and forget about. The amount of work needed may be small, of course. Ultimately, there are a few general categories of maintenance-type activities you should concern yourself with.

(more…)

(This is part VI in a multi-part series. Before continuing, I suggest you read or review the earlier parts, easily accessible via the Web Design archives.)

Now that you’ve made it to this point, the hardest part is done. Coming up with interesting content and subsequently organizing it and making it appear attractive to look at is a time-consuming and difficult task. What remains in the process of building a web site, however, is some logistic and maintenance work. The first task that faces you in your quest to build an Internet empire is deploying the web site onto the World Wide Web, and that’s the task we’re going to take a look at today.

(more…)

(This is part V of a multi-part series on web design. The other parts are readily available in the Web Design archives.)

In the last part, we focused a bit on how to approach the design itself. Now that you have a beautiful design planned out, either in your head, on paper, or in a computer graphics program, it’s time to begin the task of integrating this design with the semantic HTML we put together earlier. This task is perhaps the most difficult phase, and probably the one I can give the least advice on without writing an entire book. Nonetheless, there is an important point or two to be made, so let’s get started.

(more…)

(This is part IV in a multi-part series. You may wish to start with or review parts I, II, and III before continuing with the series.)

In the previous articles of this series, the focus has been on building actual content and learning how to best make use of HTML to present it to the wide variety of user agents currently in use. Now, however, it’s finally time to take a short break from these aspects of web design, and instead focus directly on the presentation. Before you open up your text editor and start right away at typing up your CSS, however, we instead want to first take a step back and get the design right.

(more…)

(This is the third part of a multi-part series. Before continuing, you may wish to read parts I and II.)

Now that the most important part of any web site, the content, is taken care of, we can turn our attention to other aspects of web development. No, we’re not going to be making pretty designs just yet, because we still have to focus on getting the HTML right. To that end, this post is going to focus on creating a basic HTML outline of any given page. While I’d love to write a book on authoring HTML, it’d be just that: a book, which is a bit beyond the scope of a single post. Instead, I’m going to look at a few key points to help you do the best HTML you can, which will mostly help with the accessibility point I discussed in part I.

(more…)

(This is the second part of a multi-part series. Before reading this article, you may wish to read part I.)

As I’ve stated previously, the single most important aspect of any web site is the content it offers. Without content, users have no particular reason to visit a site. The amount and quality of content directly determines whether users will visit again and tell their friends to visit as well (via word-of-mouth or simply via links on their own web sites). Now, as I see it, there are two fundamental reasons someone decides to put up a web site, each with their own content implications:

(more…)

Let’s face it, getting published on the Internet is easy. Anyone with Internet access can register a free GeoCities account, throw together a bit of HTML, and call it a web site. However, the reality of it is that putting together a successful web site can be a difficult task. Even so, there are several important attributes that can contribute to the success of any given web site:

(more…)

Much has been written about CSS since it was first introduced many years ago. The expressive power apparent by reading the specifications themselves can bring many a web designer to her knees. Designs once only possible (if at all) using nightmarish tricks like nested tables and invisible GIFs are now in the grasp of someone who still wants the code to be readable. And yet, not all is so wonderful in real life.

Perhaps the biggest problem is that specification precedes implementation. That is, we have a group of people known as the W3C publishing recommendations on how browsers (or more generally, user agents) should implement things. There are a couple of problems with this. The first is that there’s something of a disconnect—such as the old vertical centering problem. At least with up to CSS2, vertically centering something can be a difficult task, relying on specific knowledge of the size of the relevant elements, while with tables, the task is trivial.

The other problem, and definitely a more serious one, is that users use a number of browsers, and not a single one of them implements the whole of CSS2, and I can’t imagine the situation will improve much when CSS3 is finalized. The net result of this is that web designers who don’t want to target a particular version of a particular browser are left with a couple of possibilities:

Lowest Common Denominator

By far the most common solution, most webmasters seem to cater to the lowest common denominator, using a subset of CSS that works in all browsers. Accompanying this is a series of tricks and hacks to coax browsers like Internet Explorer to do things the same as other browsers. This isn’t to say that the others are even consistent with each other. In short, it’s a mess, and designers really miss out on some of the neatest features of CSS.

Different Browser? Different Style Sheet.

I haven’t noticed this solution very often, though it should, in practice, be fairly easy to implement using a bit of server-side scripting. The biggest problem here is that different users may see a slightly different version of the site, and when one day they change browsers, the interface may change leading to confusion. Nonetheless, it does offer the most possibility, especially for the most compliant browsers.

We can only hope that this situation will improve soon, or else some of the real promise of CSS will never be truly realized. With that said, what solutions do you have to the cross-browser compatibility conundrum?