The linked article is takes an interesting approach towards software piracy - it can be a good thing! I have to say that I agree with a lot of what this guy says. Give it a read.
Link: https://www.red-sweater.com/blog/332/pirates-are-future-customers
Link: https://b2evolution.net/
You may notice a slight change in the appearance of my blog. A couple days ago, I made some minor changes in how my blog site is generated. I was having a problem with words and images being chopped off the right side of the blog area. After a few small changes I was able solve the chopped off text/images problem. Since my blog software is an open source application, I felt it was polite to send the author of the software my changes, in case he wanted to use them. So, I emailed the author (in France!) my two small changes and said he was free to use them if he wanted in the main package. I got a response back from him pretty quickly, thanking me for complimenting him on the package, but that the chopping off of the text was intentional. Personally, I can't understand the desire to make a web site intentionally chop off text. As a long time GUI designer, I long ago learned the first rule of GUI design - make no assumptions about the side of the window. This means your GUI should adapt to whatever size the window is. In web terms, that means that your web site should automatically resize itself to fit whatever size browser window you happen to have open. The design of my open source blog software was violating this rule by fixing the size of the web page to a hard coded width. Because this web page was a fixed width, the browser ended up chopping off the text. My small changes fixed this issue that, to me anyway, was a bug. To the author of the blog software however, this 'bug' was by design. Now, there's nothing wrong with the author deciding to make the web pages a fixed size. As the author of the software, it is his right. However, one of the great things about open source software, such as my blogging software, is that if the software doesn't do what the user (i.e. me) wants, the user is free to change it to meet his or her needs. The blogging software didn't lay out pages as I felt was correct. I was perfectly within my rights, legally and every other way to modify the software as I see fit. The rules of open source also say that any changes you make to the software should be submitted back to the author, so that others can make use of your changes, should they choose to. I did that. The fact that the author chose not to use my changes is perfectly fine with me. We simply have differing points of view in how the software should work. My site now works the way I want it, and it continues to work the way he wants it. Everyone is happy.
I find it really ironic that a lot of the referer spam I get is linked to my blog articles against referer spam! heh.
I seem to be getting quite a bit referer spam lately. Not as much as the flood I used to get when I had the referers posted on the front page, though. I'm curious why they are interested in me again all of a sudden when I'm not showing their links.
Sed is a Unix command line tool for doing string substitutions in text files. It is VERY handy when searching for referer spam in your access logs. The article for this blog goes into great detail on how to use it.
I'll write a detailed blog on how to locate referer spam in the future...
See the link for this blog entry for a good article on Emacs.
Emacs is one of the 'big two' text editors in Unix. The other is VI. I personally prefer Emacs.