Is Sphider obsolete?

IS Sphider obsolete!?

NO! At least not yet. Sphider is on the road to obsolescence, but it’s not there just yet. Before going into further detail, I wish to point out a few things.

The intended use for Sphider is for a website to have an internal search feature for that particular site. Sphider is, and never was, intended to be a personal Google, Bing, Yahoo, Yandex, or any other search engine. Yes, it is capable of indexing more than a single website, but even there it is intended for indexing perhaps a family of related sites.

Next, keep in mind that Sphider first debuted when the web was a much simpler place. Websites consisted of a series of files and sub-directories (some might refer to them as folders). A website had a home page, often named “index.html”, or “index.php”, or “index.aspx”.  There might be a directory named “products” and files in that directory like “product1.htm” and “product2.htm”. You would access these pages from a browser with something like ‘http://bigfactory/products/product1.htm”. For many websites today, this is still a valid scenario. Maybe “https” has largely replaced “http”, but it is still the same concept.

The reality, though, is that the web is changing. Take this blog, for example. It uses WordPress, and in a pretty basic, almost primitive, way. There are quite a number of pages. There is even a contact page, which judging from what appears at the top of the browser, is located in a directory named “contact”. But you know what? There is no such directory! There is an “index.php”, but it doesn’t contain anything like what you see on the home page of this blog. Since this blog is not very complex in the way it is laid out, Sphider can index it, although the results are rather messy! That is okay, since WordPress has it’s own search functionality if the user wishes to implement it.

You will notice that the “downloads” page of this blog has a url of “https://www.blog.worldspaceflight.com/downloads/”. There is no name in the traditional sense, no page extension (htm, php, etc.). It looks like it is a directory, so the default would be “index.php” or something? NOPE!

This isn’t just a WordPress thing. This is the future of the internet. As time goes by, more and more websites are going to become like this. Cpanel settings, htaccess settings, iframes, api’s, server configurations… These all are evolving.

So what does all this have to do with Sphider? Sphider uses old technology, technology which is still in large use today. But that use is diminishing. Sphider is going to try to index some websites and immediately end with a “Relocation: 301” message and never get a step further. So why can’t Sphider simply follow the 301 and start indexing that page? Because it is a 301 that only Sphider can see. It isn’t a REAL 301. There is no redirect header, no redirect in htaccess (Apache servers). This is all in configuration. Sphider needs a file name, and increasing there just simply is no file name. It’s a modern website using features Sphider is not equipped to handle.

So is Sphider dead? No. Is Sphider dying? No, Sphider is not dying, but the universe in which it works is definitely shrinking. As websites evolve, the number of websites able to utilize Sphider is going to decrease.

So what about Sphider now? What is its future?

I don’t see any feature changes or additions in the future. Sphider will continue to be supported and updated to keep up with the technology it does use. Sphider works with PHP 8.1 and MySQL 8. As PHP evolves, Sphider will keep pace. The same goes for MySQL. Sphider will keep up. If any hidden flaws are found in the code, it will be corrected. If security issues are detected, we will attempt to address them.

As the web evolves, there may come a time in five or ten years, when Sphider becomes a quality buggy whip in a Tesla world. Even then you will still be able to find it residing in some antique software repository. But it isn’t quite ready to hang it all up just yet.

Worldspaceflight.com – Broken pages!

It seems that quite a number of pages in the Astronauts ‘n’ Cosmonauts section of worldspaceflight.com went blank! What the heck happened?

Well, the site is database driven and the database server got upgraded. That is a good thing, but… one of our table names became a reserved word!

We changed the table name and have updated the queries for the new name. The pages are working again.

All of them? I THINK so, but may have missed a query somewhere, so if you see an empty page, let us know.

Thanks!

Eric Jones, Spammer Extraordinaire

If you have a website with a contact form, you probably know of the “beloved” Eric Jones. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

If your site is Word Press, get an Akismet account and API key and install the Akismet Antispam plugin. If your contact form is Contact Form 7, these lines in the form will block this prolific spammer:

<label> Your Email (required)
[email* your-email akismet:author_email] </label>

I believe Akismet will also work with other contact forms, such as Gravity.

If your website is not Word Press, but can handle PHP pages, a custom contact form can easily include a filter to exclude his email id. Here is a sample snippet of code:

function ValidateMail($Email)
{
global $HTTP_HOST;
$result = array();

if (strcmp($Email,”eric.jones.z.mail@gmail.com”) == 0) {
$result[0]=false;
$result[1]=”Known spammer”;
return $result;
}
}

 

Sphider 4.0.0-MB and SphiderLite 2.0.0 released

The backup and restore utilities have been reworked to use MySQL directly. This provides higher dependability than depending on PHP.  Also, a limited ability to resume a re-index process which has been interrupted has been introduced. The process to determine page character set has been enhanced. Language file conversion to Unicode has been completed. Obsolete versions of code have been removed and general code cleanup done. Further safeguards against indexing of illegal characters has been implemented. SphiderLite has had more remnants of the full version removed.

Critical update to SphiderLite, SphiderLite 1.3.1 released

A critical flaw was discovered in SphiderLite which affected the indexing of URLs. This has been corrected in 1.3.1.

All users of previous versions of SphiderLite are urged to STOP USING IMMEDIATELY and upgrade to version 1.3.1. It does seem that initial indexing with no special circumstances was successful in prior versions, re-indexing was adversely affected. If Sphider was allowed to leave the domain, there could also have been adverse effects.

The cause of the problem? SphiderLite is a scaled down version of the full featured Sphider. When the full version was scaled down, some function parameters unique to the the full version were inadvertently retained, throwing off the parameter sequence in the Lite version.

SphiderLite 1.3.1, in addition to fixing this critical flaw, has also improved the method of determining a page’s character set, improved filtering of emojis, and improved filtering of unwanted characters in the indexing of keywords.

Sphider 3.6.0-MB is UNAFFECTED by the flaw discovered in SphiderLite. It will, however, soon be updated with the same additional improvements in this Lite version.

Sphider 3.6.0-MB, SphiderLite 1.3.0 released

A potential runaway regular expression resulting in missing titles has been corrected. Crawl performance has been improved by fixing a bug that caused Sphider to try to crawl pages returning codes like 301, 401, 403, and 404. The absence of a robots.txt file on sites being crawled was generating warning errors, and this has been corrected. More potential PHP 8 errors have been averted. More obsolete code has been removed. The MB version now reports when a feed becomes invalid.

Sphider 3.5.2-MB and SphiderLite 1.2.2 are released

A change to how Sphider does searches was very recently implemented. It was found, however, that everything worked fine, PROVIDED all searches yielded results! If a search should not have any valid results, a message saying “The search for [search] yielded no documents” is supposed to be displayed. Instead, such a search actually presented the results from the last successful search! NOT GOOD!

It was found that session variables were not being cleared in the event a search yielded no results. That has been corrected.

Sphider 3.5.1-MB, SphiderLite 1.2.1

Sphider is multibyte capable. It has been since Sphider 3.0.0-MB. Sphider 3.0.0 only worked on installations which had the PHP mbstring module installed. Sphider 3.1.0-MB and later works on all installations, and if the mbstring module was missing, it was emulated. Obviously, if the module was present, emulation was not needed. Well, one emulated function neglected to check for mbstring and ALWAYS emulated the function. This version corrects that. The result is that if an installation has mbstring installed, searches will run faster than before.

Versions prior to Sphider 3.5.1 and SphiderLite 1.2.1 will work, but just not nearly as efficiently.

Sphider 3.5.0-MB, SphiderLite 1.2.0 released

The text search feature has been updated to provide more efficiency and quicker response. Previously, a search was repeated for every page of results. This has been changed so that a particular search is performed only once. Then the appropriate subset of results is displayed for each page. This does not improve searches with only 1 page of results, but each page thereafter will see an improvement.

Sphider 3.4.5-MB, SphiderLite 1.1.5 released

This release fixes problems with robots.txt files, removes obsolete database functions, and removes code deprecated in PHP 7.4 and removed in PHP 8. Barring surprises, both versions of Sphider should be PHP 8 compatible.

Maintenance releases for the PDO version of Sphider have ended and the PDO version has been removed from the general download library.