Put Microsoft's MSNbot On a Leash

Many webmasters have complained that Microsoft's Msnbot crawler for its as yet vaporware search product have been chewing through way too much bandwidth, and way too hard. In fact many large site, including WebmasterWorld.com have taken to blocking the bot altogether.

A MSN search tech has now posted a solution - the MSNbot will now respect the following robots.txt command:

User-Agent: msnbot
Crawl-Delay: 20

This will cause the bot to wait 20 seconds between each page request, which will certainly alleviate the server load for larger sites - assuming they want to allow a bot without a search engine to chew up their site.

MSN promises that their search will be ready "real soon now"...

Mozilla's Googlebar, Now with Page Rank

If you use Mac or Linux, and you promote sites, you probably have resorted to checking your Page Rank with a friend's machine - or even a "dedicated" PC especially for checking your Google Toolbar Page Rank.

1. Download FireFox browser from http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/

2. Install the GoogleBar Mozilla extension from http://googlebar.mozdev.org/

3. Install the PR indicator extension from http://toolbar.nickstallman.net/

Bling - now you can see the Page Rank indicator just like windows users - without touching a PC - ya aloof bastards! :P