Ahhh, no more GoogleBot... I hope!

To my surprise, the bandwidth for our website at www.gerona.gov.ph is almost spent. :(

Upon inspection of log statistics with AWSTATS, I was surprised that it was no other than GoogleBot that has been churning our bandwidth. All the while, I thought that the culprit was the Gallery and all the photos on it.

So with my limited knowledge on this webserver stuff, how do I stop GoogleBot from eating our bandwidth?!

Ironically, Google itself provided the answers. I did this search and this search wherein I learned that I have to place a robots.txt at the accessible root (e.g. http://gerona.gov.ph/robots.txt) of our website.

So what are the contents of the robots.txt file?! I find this link very helpful. Even more helpful is this link where it automatically gives you the correct content of the robots.txt file to block specific bots. This webpage is also a good source of information.

As of this writing, I haven't tested if its working but I'm keeping my fingers crossed as GoogleBot is threatening to eat all of our site's bandwidth.

The question is, why is it doing that?! Is it being used by malicious spammers, some sort of vehicle?! I hope to be enlightened. Anyone?

Update: It works! GoogleBot and Inktomi is no longer eating my bandwidth :)

Joomla! did it for LMP

The office of the League of Municipalities of the Philippines thru Mr. Norio Alumno asked me if I can develop a website for them. Since I had no time to do such, I then offered them to try Joomla wherein I can help them learn it.

The TASK: Help three people who don't have any much idea on web publishing, HTML and website design to create a website for a national organization of municipalities in two days... impossible?! Not with Joomla! -- a free open source content management system and the first FOSS I've ever used. Its the software that made me ask "WTF is open source?!"

To make the story short, this is their website after two days of coaching them (with me just talking and them doing everything else): www.lmp.org.ph. I am proud of these guys for the interest and enthusiasm they showed during the training (or is it just coaching?!). They have Sir Norio, the amiable chief of the Research and Information Management Office, Sir Herbert who is an all around go-to guy, and of course my good friend Joseph who managed to create a banner for their website in just a few minutes.

For other government agencies and/or local government units who would like to learn the basics of Joomla!, I am just an email away at daveasuncion[at]gmail.com