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For 2023 (and 2024 ...) - we are now fully retired from IT training.
We have made many, many friends over 25 years of teaching about Python, Tcl, Perl, PHP, Lua, Java, C and C++ - and MySQL, Linux and Solaris/SunOS too. Our training notes are now very much out of date, but due to upward compatability most of our examples remain operational and even relevant ad you are welcome to make us if them "as seen" and at your own risk.

Lisa and I (Graham) now live in what was our training centre in Melksham - happy to meet with former delegates here - but do check ahead before coming round. We are far from inactive - rather, enjoying the times that we are retired but still healthy enough in mind and body to be active!

I am also active in many other area and still look after a lot of web sites - you can find an index ((here))
Static mirroring through HTTrack, wget and others

Our web site is not best suited to off-line browsing these days - it may be flexible, but if you want to take a copy of it, but it onto a CD, then browse away from the Internet, please resist the temptation. Why is it NOT a good idea to 'blind mirror' us?

1. The Changing nature of our web site. Our pages are adaptive; if you browse from Aberdeen, you'll be offered pulldown menus asking if you're in Aberdeen, Inverness, Dundee, Perth, but if you're browsing from Bristol, you'll be offered Bristol, Bath, Newport, Taunton. If you're browsing with Internet Explorer, some adoption of the HTML will be made to accommodate non-standard features. Your previous visit history will be noted and you'll have different options highlighted as our page is presented in a way to help you navigate. None of these features can work from a mirror CD!

2. Our size. We've got around 15,000 different URLs on this web site ... pages ranging from pictures of Gosport Station to using Utility methods to construct objects of different type in Python, and it's unlikely that you'll want them all - so mirroring is a very slow and very blunt tool which hurts ...

3. Our bandwidth. It's a serious resource hog if you try to copy all of our pages. You're costing us a lot of bandwidth, you're slowing down others who are trying to use our site - basically, you're being antisocial (though probably not intentionally so!). And do you know the worst of it ...

4. Out of date. Your mirror copy will rapidly go out of date, as this is a dynamic site where new examples are added, links updated, and comments amended somewhere all the time. Having spent a lot of time creating a traffic jam, you'll find that the destination really wasn't worth going to.

5. Copyright issues. I am also concerned about our copyright issues; I appreciate that duplicating content is easy, but I would much rather provide a feed to people as they need pages than have - as I have found in the past - mirrored pages that have out-of-date or unaltered absolute links, and are said to be in our name - they get us a bad reputation when really they are an imitation, and ought to be the sincerest form of flattery.

If you're thinking of mirroring us ... please don't do it ... and if you have found this page unexpectedly ... our web site probably thinks that you are trying to mirror it, and is asking you not to do so!

How do we detect mirroring operations?

There are certain programs that do it, and we look for things like wget (link) and HTTrack (link) in our User Agent requests / logs. Such signals aren't going to find the people who try to hide what they're doing, but we have other flags that may find them. This is something we discuss on courses such as Linux Web Server which helps you with your httpd deployment.

How should you as a webmaster handle such bulk download requests?

First things first - work out what you want to do. Do you want to allow mirrors, allow part of the site to be mirrored, rudely lock and bolt the front door against mirroring, or hang up a polite sign that says 'please do not mirror'. And if you go for the latter, how do you get your mirrorers to actually read the sign?

If you've decided to restrict your users from mirroring, have a look at robots.txt, and have a look too at the environment variables that are set by the user agent and their use in conjunction with either deny directives or RewriteCond directives. And if you have common include files, you can put some database recording and monitoring in there to pick up unusual traffic flows that are the characteristic of mirroring attempts on larger sites ... all of which make very long subjects for a blog, but for excellent lunchtime discussions on a PHP techniques Workshop!
(written 2009-03-03, updated 2009-03-04)

 
Associated topics are indexed as below, or enter http://melksh.am/nnnn for individual articles
G911 - Well House Consultants - Search Engine Optimisation
  [165] Implementing an effective site search engine - (2005-01-01)
  [427] The Melksham train - a button is pushed - (2005-08-28)
  [1015] Search engine placement - long term strategy and success - (2006-12-30)
  [1029] Our search engine placement is dropping. - (2007-01-11)
  [1344] Catching up on indexing our resources - (2007-09-10)
  [1793] Which country does a search engine think you are located in? - (2008-09-11)
  [1969] Search Engines. Getting the right pages seen. - (2009-01-01)
  [1971] Telling Google which country your business trades in - (2009-01-02)
  [1982] Cooking bodies and URLs - (2009-01-08)
  [1984] Site24x7 prowls uninvited - (2009-01-10)
  [2000] 2000th article - Remember the background and basics - (2009-01-18)
  [2019] Baby Caleb and Fortune City in your web logs? - (2009-01-31)
  [2045] Does robots.txt actually work? - (2009-02-16)
  [2106] Learning to Twitter / what is Twitter? - (2009-03-28)
  [2107] How to tweet automatically from a blog - (2009-03-28)
  [2137] Reaching the right people with your web site - (2009-04-23)
  [2324] What search terms FAIL to bring visitors to our site, when they should? - (2009-08-05)
  [2330] Update - Automatic feeds to Twitter - (2009-08-09)
  [2428] Diluting History - (2009-09-27)
  [2552] Web site traffic - real users, or just noise? - (2009-12-26)
  [2562] Tuning the web site for sailing on through this year - (2010-01-03)
  [2686] Freedom of Information - consideration for web site designers - (2010-03-20)
  [2748] Monitoring the success and traffic of your web site - (2010-05-01)
  [3670] Reading Google Analytics results, based on the relative populations of countries - (2012-03-24)
  [3746] Google Analytics and the new UK Cookie law - (2012-06-02)
  [4121] Has your Twitter feed stopped working? Switching to their new API - (2013-06-23)

G902 - Well House Consultants - Web site techniques, utility and visibility
  [23] Skills and responsibilities - (2004-08-22)
  [32] Web design platoon - (2004-08-29)
  [98] No more 'Error 404' pages. Something better. - (2004-10-24)
  [109] URLs - a service and not a hurdle - (2004-11-04)
  [117] A case of case - (2004-11-14)
  [142] Colour for access - (2004-12-06)
  [173] Data Mining - (2005-01-09)
  [179] The hunt for unique words - (2005-01-16)
  [182] Your personal Google ranking - (2005-01-19)
  [197] Allow for peak traffic on your web site - (2005-02-01)
  [202] Searching for numbers - (2005-02-04)
  [222] Who are all these visitors? - (2005-02-20)
  [259] Responding to spam - (2005-03-27)
  [261] Putting a form online - (2005-03-29)
  [268] Information request forms, cleaning up spam - (2005-04-05)
  [274] Our most popular resources - (2005-04-10)
  [276] An apology to Mr Boneparte - (2005-04-11)
  [278] Cover all the options - (2005-04-13)
  [284] The Iconish language - (2005-04-19)
  [288] Colour blindness for web developers - (2005-04-22)
  [311] Growth pains - (2005-05-14)
  [314] What language is this written in? - (2005-05-17)
  [320] Ordnance Survey - using a 'Get a map' - (2005-05-22)
  [322] More maps - (2005-05-23)
  [347] Frightening and from-friend viruses and spams - (2005-06-14)
  [348] Graveyard pages - (2005-06-15)
  [369] CMS - the minefield of Choices - (2005-07-05)
  [376] What brings people to my web site? - (2005-07-13)
  [414] Form Madness - (2005-08-14)
  [492] New Navigation Aid - Launch of My Wellho - (2005-11-11)
  [510] Dynamic Web presence - next generation web site - (2005-11-29)
  [528] Getting favicon to work - avoiding common pitfalls - (2005-12-14)
  [533] Bigger Box Campaign - (2005-12-18)
  [649] Denial of Service ''attack'' - (2006-03-17)
  [658] Keeping the visitors happy and browsing - (2006-03-26)
  [681] Mirroring a dynamic site - (2006-04-12)
  [718] Protecting images from theft - (2006-05-12)
  [732] Where is a web site visitor browsing from - (2006-05-24)
  [757] Horse and Python training - (2006-06-12)
  [767] Finding the language preference of a web site visitor - (2006-06-18)
  [800] Effective web campaign? - (2006-07-12)
  [893] Visibility - (2006-10-14)
  [916] Driving customers away - (2006-11-07)
  [976] Santa at the station - (2006-12-09)
  [994] Training on Cascading Style Sheets - (2006-12-17)
  [1055] Above the fold - (2007-01-28)
  [1104] Drawing dynamic graphs in PHP - (2007-03-09)
  [1177] Sorting out for a site map - (2007-05-05)
  [1184] Finding resources - some pointers - (2007-05-13)
  [1186] Two new pages / sites - (2007-05-14)
  [1198] From Web to Web 2 - (2007-05-21)
  [1207] Simple but effective use of mod_rewrite (Apache httpd) - (2007-05-27)
  [1212] What brought YOU to our web site? - (2007-06-01)
  [1237] What proportion of our web traffic is robots? - (2007-06-19)
  [1297] Stuffing content into a web page - easy maintainance - (2007-08-09)
  [1437] Above the fold with First Great Western - (2007-11-19)
  [1494] A time to update pictures - (2008-01-03)
  [1505] Script to present commonly used images - PHP - (2008-01-13)
  [1506] Ongoing Image Copyright Issues, PHP and MySQL solutions - (2008-01-14)
  [1513] Perl, PHP or Python? No - Perl AND PHP AND Python! - (2008-01-20)
  [1534] Where in the world / country is my visitor from? - (2008-02-07)
  [1541] Colour, Composition or Content - (2008-02-16)
  [1554] Online hotel reservations - Melksham, Wiltshire (near Bath) - (2008-02-24)
  [1610] PHP course dot co, dot uk - (2008-04-13)
  [1630] To provide external links, or not? - (2008-05-04)
  [1634] Kiss and Book - (2008-05-07)
  [1653] How do Google Ads work? - (2008-05-25)
  [1711] Rapid growth leads to server move - (2008-07-17)
  [1747] Who is watching you? - (2008-08-10)
  [1756] Ever had One of THOSE mornings? - (2008-08-16)
  [1797] I have been working hard but I do not expect you noticed - (2008-09-14)
  [1833] Web Bloopers - good form design - avoiding pitfalls - (2008-10-11)
  [1856] A few of my favourite things - (2008-10-26)
  [1888] Find the link - (2008-11-16)
  [1955] How to avoid duplicating web page maintainance - (2008-12-20)
  [1961] Making our things easier to find - (2008-12-26)
  [1970] Plagarism - who is copying my pages? - (2009-01-02)
  [2056] Web Site Loading - experiences and some solutions shared - (2009-02-26)
  [2225] How important is a front page ranking on a search engine? - (2009-06-09)
  [2332] Formation, des langages Open Source - (2009-08-09)
  [2333] Formaci[83][c2]ón, de los lenguajes de c[83][c2]ódigo abierto - (2009-08-09)
  [2334] Formazione, Open Source computer lingue - (2009-08-09)
  [2335] Ausbildung, die Open-Source-Sprachen - (2009-08-09)
  [2336] Forma[83][c2]ç[83][c2]ão, Open Source computador l[83][c2]ínguas - (2009-08-09)
  [2337] Opleiding, Open Source computertalen - (2009-08-09)
  [2338] Uddannelse, Open Source computer sprog - (2009-08-09)
  [2339] Oppl[83][c2]æring, Open Source datamaskinen spr[83][c2]åk - (2009-08-09)
  [2340] ldning, Open Source dator spr[83][c2]åk - (2009-08-09)
  [2341] Koulutus, Open Source tietokone kielill[83][c2]ä - (2009-08-09)
  [2389] Writing with our customers words - (2009-09-01)
  [2410] Removal of technical resources from this site - (2009-09-19)
  [2519] Status Page / breaks of service in early December - (2009-11-30)
  [2532] Analysing Google arrivals by country of origin - (2009-12-10)
  [2569] How to run a successful online poll / petition / survey / consultation - (2010-01-10)
  [2668] Is it worth it? - (2010-03-09)
  [2981] How to set up short and meaningfull alternative URLs - (2010-10-02)
  [3022] Retaining web site visitors - reducing the one page wonders - (2010-10-31)
  [3087] Making the most of critical emails - reading behind the scene - (2010-12-16)
  [3149] Looking back at www.wellho.net - (2011-01-28)
  [3197] Finding and diverting image requests from rogue domains - (2011-03-08)
  [3367] Google +1 - what is it? - (2011-07-22)
  [3426] Automed web site testing scripted in Ruby using watir-webdriver - (2011-09-09)
  [3491] Who is knocking at your web site door? Are you well set up to deal with allcomers? - (2011-10-21)
  [3532] Sharing the user experience - designing a form with the customer in mind - (2011-11-29)
  [3554] Learning more about our web site - and learning how to learn about yours - (2011-12-17)
  [3563] How big is a web page these days? Does the size of your pages matter? - (2011-12-26)
  [3589] Promoting a single one of your domains on the search engines - (2012-01-22)
  [3623] Some TestWise examples - helping use Ruby code to check your web site operation - (2012-02-24)
  [3734] QR codes with marketing logos embedded - (2012-05-16)
  [3744] Short Web Addresses for Melksham - (2012-05-30)
  [3745] Legal change - You need to obtain user consent if you use cookies on your website - (2012-06-01)
  [3776] Some traps it's so easy to fall into in designing your web site - (2012-06-23)
  [3896] An email marathon - (2012-10-15)
  [3974] TV show appearance - how does it effect your web site? - (2013-01-13)
  [4001] Helping search engines with appropriate 400 error codes - (2013-02-11)
  [4076] Web site - fully back! - (2013-04-29)
  [4115] More or less back - what happened to our server the other day - (2013-06-14)
  [4136] How do I post automatically from a PHP script to my Twitter account? - (2013-07-10)
  [4239] Facebook marketing - early experiences - (2014-01-19)
  [4376] Well House Consultants, Well House Manor, First Great Western Coffee shop, TransWilts / 2014 web site reports - (2015-01-01)
  [4401] Selecting RECENT and POPULAR news and trends for your web site users - (2015-01-19)
  [4474] Effect on external factors on traffic to our web sites - an update - (2015-04-26)
  [4492] Almost so wrong, but perhaps it's right for some? - (2015-05-11)


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Some other Articles
Efficient calls to subs in Perl - avoid duplication, gain speed
Playing Catchup
Perl - lists do so much more than arrays
Melksham Industrial
Static mirroring through HTTrack, wget and others
East of Melksham Countryside
Internal Dummy Connections on Apache httpd
Virtual hosting and mod_proxy forwarding of different domains (httpd)
Tomcat 6 - Annotated Sample Configuration Files
Database connection Pooling, SSL, and command line deployment - httpd and Tomcat
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This is a page archived from The Horse's Mouth at http://www.wellho.net/horse/ - the diary and writings of Graham Ellis. Every attempt was made to provide current information at the time the page was written, but things do move forward in our business - new software releases, price changes, new techniques. Please check back via our main site for current courses, prices, versions, etc - any mention of a price in "The Horse's Mouth" cannot be taken as an offer to supply at that price.

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