Articles Posted During May 2005

blo.gs to be sold, user data to be transferred

It's normally considered rude to reprint the contents of an email without permission, but this one is obviously intended for broad distribution, and its content is displayed at http://blo.gs/. Because it could easily be overlooked by the intended recipients, I'm posting here as a public service announcement:

hello, blo.gs user!

i am in the final stages of completing a sale of blo.gs to a new owner, and expect to hand over the site, along with your user data, sometime on or after june 13, 2005.

so as spelled out in the blo.gs privacy policy, this is your opportunity to have your account deleted before this transfer happens. you can delete your account by going to http://blo.gs/quit.php, or by sending an email to delete@blo.gs.

i'm sorry i can't yet say who it is that will be acquiring blo.gs, but i can pass on the assurance that there will be no change in the privacy policy when they acquire the service and you will be given the opportunity to consent to any future change. they plan to continue providing the same features that exist now, and will be working on making blo.gs even better.

the new owners will be in touch shortly after they've taken over the service next month.

thanks for your support!

jim

Hopefully, the new owners have only honorable intentions, but without knowing anything about them, I'm not comfortable having my data transferred to parties unknown, so have removed myself from the system. I trust Jim to honor his policy and delete my information before handing over the keys.

2005-05-15 12:22:00

Poor man's referrer log

Looking for real-time feedback as to where Web traffic is coming from, but don't want to deal with the overhead of writing to a database or text file on every request like Refer and ShortStat?

Here's a simple PHP script I use to grab the most recent referrers from Apache's logs:

<?php

$refs =
  `tail -5000 /var/log/apache/centricle.com/access.log \
        | cut -d '"' -f 4 \
        | grep -v '^-\|http://\(www.\)\?centricle' \
        | tac`;

echo "<pre>$refs</pre>";

?>

For those who don't spend much time on the command line, here's a quick explanation of what's happening:

tail grabs the last 5000 lines from access.log, and hands them off to cut, which finds the 4th field (as delimited by a double quote), and feeds it to grep. If that field doesn't begin with a single dash (-), 'http://centricle', or 'http://www.centricle', it's added to a list that's passed to tac, which prints the list in reverse.

2005-05-12 16:00:38