Recently I implemented an RSS feed on the home page for the latest sites list. This is automatically generated but subscribers don’t know this since all they see is feed.xml I use a method known as htaccess to transparently re-direct requests for this feed to a script that generates it.

Unfortunately, I overwrote the existing htaccess file that is needed for the directory pages. So this small mistake shut off all the directory pages resulting in error 404’s. I think it took me 1 week to notice. Sorry if it caused you some problems. The lesson to be learned here is to always test the main sections of the whole site even if small changes are made.

Another change I made was to the site submission process. On confirmation page, I was trying to do 2 things at once: open the client’s email package and display a thank you page. This works OK with Firefox but Internet Explorer does not display the page since the email client was opened before the HTML of the page is reached and it doesn’t seem to allow these 2 things to happen simultaneously.

So this kind of user experience was making people think the page was down and some were re-submitting multiple times. So now I’ve fixed this by replacing the automated email opening script with a button to open the email client on the thank you page.

What I was worried about was getting hit by automated submission scripts. So asking people to send an email to me should be a good way to tell people from bots since the spammers will want to remain anonymous and not leave a trail.

At some stage I may need to introduce a captcha if I get too many spams, but time will tell.