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I've moved from ibiblio.org to henriettesherbal.com.

On the 10th of November, somebody wrote to the ibiblio collection folks list, asking if anybody else had trouble accessing mysql.

On the 11th of November, I started to get emails telling me that the plant name search on my main site (the old ibiblio.org/herbmed setup) was wonky.

I asked ibiblio about it, and they said: "yep, it's excessive spidering of your content, crashing our mysql server". They also asked me to cache things, and told me that they'd disabled my mysql account and would enable it as soon as the excessive spidering was over and done with.

Bleh for rude robots (= spiders), says I.

Now, I have no idea how to cache things, unless you do it as explained in the mysql manual, by adding caching to the config files ... which the ibiblio admins have access to. I don't.

I've tried to block bad bots on ibiblio a few months ago, but you can't really block anything on ibiblio, cos they proxy the lot locally.

So I told them to add the .php scripts in my /pictures/ directory to their robots.txt: the content can be picked up by simply going from .htm file to .htm file.

No reply.

I then told them about the Crawl-delay: 90, which you can add to robots.txt, which means that spiders which honor this particular entry only will pick up one page every 90 seconds.

No reply.

They have access to the ibiblio robots.txt file, I don't.

On dreamhost (the host of this site), the blocking of bots works admirably, and I have my own robots.txt, which I can change as much as I like.

On the 11th and the 12th of November I copied my pics and the classic texts to henriettesherbal.com, just in case ibiblio was still wonky come Monday (November 14th).

My ibiblio mysql account is still closed today, Tuesday November 15.

So, without further ado:

Henriette's herbal pages are now found here.