Philip Nicosia

Pete wins Big Brother and quite deservedly so. There was no doubt in my mind that he would win and was the clear favourite right from day 1 to win the £100,000 prize.

Glyn came in second followed by Aisleyne in third, Richard in fourth, Nikki in fifth and Jenny in sixth place.

Although this is the 7th series of Big Brother it is the only one I have been able to watch. It was the most controversial series yet with Big Brother constantly changing the rules but for me that only added to the appeal of the program.

I’m sure we will be seeing a lot more of the instant celebrities from this series in the near future.

The Robots.txt protocol, also called the “robots exclusion standard” is designed to lock out web spiders from accessing part of a website. It is a security or privacy measure, the equivalent of hanging a “Keep Out” sign on your door.

This protocol is used by web site administrators when there are sections or files that they would rather not be accessed by the rest of the world. This could include employee lists, or files that they are circulating internally. For example, the White House website uses robots.txt to block any inquiries on speeches by the Vice President, a photo essay of the First Lady, and profiles of the 911 victims.

How does the protocol work? It lists the files that shouldn’t be scanned, and places it in the top-level directory of the website. The robots.txt protocol was created by consensus in June 1994 by members of the robots mailing list (robots-request@nexor.co.uk). There is no official standards body or RFC for the protocol, so it’s difficult to legislate or mandate that the protocol be followed. In fact, the file is treated as strictly advisory, and does not have absolute guarantee that those contents won’t be read.

In effect, robots.txt requires cooperation by the web spider and even the reader, since anything that is uploaded into the internet becomes publicly available. You aren’t locking them out of those pages, you are just making it harder for them to get in. But it takes very little for them to ignore these instructions. Computer hackers can also easily penetrate the files and retrieve information. So the rule of thumb is—if it’s that sensitive, it shouldn’t be on your website to begin with or it should be in a password protected folder.

Care, however, should be taken to ensure that the Robots.txt protocol doesn’t block the website robots from other areas of the website. This will dramatically affect your search engine ranking, as the search engines rely on the robots to find and register the pages.

One misplaced hyphen or dash can have catastrophic effects. For example, the robots.txt patterns are matched by simple substring comparisons, so care should be taken to make sure that patterns matching directories have the final ‘/’ character appended: otherwise all files with names starting with that substring will match, rather than just those in the directory intended.

To avoid these problems, consider checking your pages with a robots.txt analyzer. Google has a free one within their Google Webmaster Tools.

Pete had a vision where his friend who died told him he would be the winner. He is worried that if he doesn’t win how that would affect his believe in his vision and heaven.

Pete is the nicest most genuine person in the house by far. He deserves to win and I for hope he does so his belief in his vision remains intact with his faith.

To vote for Pete:

Text PETE to 84444
(Texts cost 50p, plus std msg rate)
Call 09011 32 33 11
(Calls cost 50p, mobile and other network rates may vary)
10p from every vote will go to charity

Pete to win!

101 Ways to Build Link Popularity in 2006

There is no doubt that link building is still an important area for any website that wants to do well. The ultimate aim of any link building campaign is to increase the traffic to your site. This is achieved in 2 ways mainly, click through traffic from the links themselves and link popularity to help your search engine rankings.

Aaron Wall from SEO Book has written an article together with Andy Hagans explaining in great detail what you should and shouldn’t be doing. It lists 71 good ways of building links and 30 bad ways to build links and is a must read for anyone with a website.

To view the article go to 101 Ways to Build Link Popularity in 2006

This morning a 6 mile journey that would normally take me about 15 minutes has just taken an hour. There are road works at the entrance to Watermead where I live where they are building a new junction.

There is only 1 road in and out of Watermead and it took me 45 minutes to travel less than half a mile. This wasn’t even at rush hour and schools out so the roads are normally even quieter.

I expected there to be delays as last night it took 30 minutes to get into Watermead but this is a joke. Can’t these planners anticipate these problems and put in contingencies?

What’s worse is there is little confidence that when the new junction is completed that it will help with congestion at all and if anything the general consensus is that it will be worse.

Yet another waste of tax payers hard earned money!