Advanced .htaccess Security – Block Unwanted Referrers
For some bloggers and web developers, Digg can be a huge boost in traffic and thus a huge bust in ad revenue. Unfortunately, the Digg Effect can kill a website's bandwidth and get the website shut down. Wouldn't it be great if a weary web developer could prevent his site from being shut down by blocking users referred by Digg, at least a while? Using a small bit of .htaccess code and mod_rewrite, the developer can do just that.
The Code
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} digg.com [NC]
RewriteRule .* - [F]
Say good-bye to Digg Death with this small, easy-to-place snippet of code!
![Introducing MooTools Templated]()
One major problem with creating UI components with the MooTools JavaScript framework is that there isn't a great way of allowing customization of template and ease of node creation. As of today, there are two ways of creating:
new Element Madness
The first way to create UI-driven...
![fetch API]()
One of the worst kept secrets about AJAX on the web is that the underlying API for it, XMLHttpRequest, wasn't really made for what we've been using it for. We've done well to create elegant APIs around XHR but we know we can do better. Our effort to...
![Instagram For MooTools]()
If you're still rocking an iPhone and fancy taking a photo every now and then, you'd be crazy not to be using an app called Instagram. With Instagram you take the photos just as you would with your native iPhone camera app, but Instagram...
![CSS Background Animations]()
Background animations are an awesome touch when used correctly. In the past, I used MooTools to animate a background position. Luckily these days CSS animations are widely supported enough to rely on them to take over JavaScript-based animation tasks. The following simple CSS snippet animates...
David,
I have a quick question for ya… can you make this .htaccess so you can transfer them to a “slimmed” down version of the same page or simply a blank page that says sorry digg users the site is offline for awhile?
One more question. When digg or any other site goes down for scheduled maintenance do they use this method to redirect all pages to a sorry we are down page?
Mark
Not a bad idea with your first question, Mark. Per your idea, I’d create a new sort of page template to do this. Say that “page.php” is getting hit hard and you want to show a slimmed down page. On page.php, you could check the referrer and if the referrer was digg, you could do a header() redirect to “slimpage.php?page=”.(yourpage). You’d them have slimpage.php provide a text-only version of your article.
As for a site being down, I’d bet that this is what they do. It’s very easy and very simple. Unfortunately, Digg, for example, doesn’t allow you to view their .htaccess file anymore.
What do you think abut blocking : “Options FollowSymLinks”, i think this is important also