I use the WordPress Redirection plugin (https://wordpress.com/plugins/redirection) to manage redirects on our production site.

One of the more annoying things I deal with is random crappy bots that just crawl the site occasionally. Because they crawl so rarely (and inexpertly) they often look for ancient pages, or use ridiculous URL parameters (if anyone knows why they do this can you let me know in the comments?)

Rather than treat these as valid 404s, I think it’s best to ignore them completely. However, matching a user agent string in Redirection is not straight forward. To this end I wrote a Regex to match three of the most annoying culprits: MojeekBot, SeekportBot & Barkrowler.

Maybe it’ll help you too.

It’s nice to know that, even though I’m not based in an office anymore, I can still “fix people’s computers” by (metaphorically) standing behind them and watching them.

I made myself a “Mastodon” account a while back (@dtw). Since then I’ve ActivityPub enabled my website (@rubyquartglassess@rubyquartzglasses.me.uk) (yeah, I need to shorten that).

Now, I want to start using . I can create “Pixelfed” account from scratch, or by “authenticating” with one of my existing accounts, right? However, I think, anyone can follow my @dtw or @rubyquartglassess@rubyquartzglasses.me.uk feed from pixelfed anyway… so, I don’t need an account on a pixelfed server?

And then I wonder, if any fedi app can read any ActivityPub feed, why are there different apps?

Pretty much speechless at the damage caused by to the countryside in Buckinghamshire. I don’t even live there and it’s heart breaking.

Still, we had to find some way of getting the money out of the public coffers and into someone’s pockets. God knows we couldn’t just spend it on people that need it.