12 Laws Every Blogger Needs to Know

An anonymous reader noted a nice piece discussing 12 laws bloggers need to know which includes explanations of matters including domain name trademarks, deep linking, fair use of thumbnails and so on. It's worth a read for most anyone who puts words on this here interweb.

And one helpful standard:

[croddy]

Also helps to know the Robots Exclusion Standard [robotstxt.org], to keep the riff-raff out.

Mirrordot link to cached article

[davidc]

Sinfe TFA is slashdotted, here's the mirrordot link:

http://www.mirrordot.org/stories/8d350aa16dcfd9cf6 c191eacab9214c8/index.html [mirrordot.org]

Re:DO NOT READ TFA

[Hatta]

He might be thinking of patent law, where if it can be shown that one had foreknowledge of an infringing patent, the penalties are higher.

Surviving the slashdot effect

[jmorris42]

> Try to avoid being posted on slashdot, unless you have a profesional grade server capable of handling
> ten thousand something simultaineous hits on your site.

Depends. It appears that it isn't the web server or internet connection that fail in a typical slashdotting, it is the database server. Static content is the best defense against slashdot or any other flash mob event. Either avoid the temptation to go with dynamic content in the first place or have a way to switch into overflow mode when the load gets too heavy for your database server to cope.

I happened to take a full slash assault on my workplace server while I was out of town and never lost the ability to get in remotely, the server stayed available and work continued. The webserver was a lowly dual proc Pentium II fed from a single T1. The key was all of the content was hand generated static html.

Even CNN goes to a static homepage when a major news event happens. If it is big enough they disable everything else. If they can't buy enough iron to serve dynamic content during a surge YOU can't either. To not design around it is illogical.