ttp-news mailing list

Every month, we prepare an e-mail newsletter and mail it to ~9,000 subscribers.

The mailing list is kept in ACEware, but we use the campus GNU Mailman list manager to send the newsletter.

Every month, then, we need to move the mailing list from ACE to Mailman.

For future reference, here's what I did today:

1. Clean the list in a text editor (I used BBEdit)
zap "
replace , and ; with \r
look for illegal characters: [^a-zA-Z0-9\r.@_'-]
this also finds a pair of email addresses separated by a space and one by " or "
lowercase
sort
dedupe (184)

2. Manage mailing list
https://calmail.berkeley.edu/manage/list/mylists
log in as ttplists
choose ttp-news
choose Advanced
choose Bulk Remove
choose Remove all current subscribers (at bottom)
Submit
Now we're limited to adding 5,000 addresses at a time, so I cut 'n' paste into the web form instead of uploading a file
I get a proxy error every time, but when I check it has uploaded OK

Google Public Service Search is dead -- Long Live Google Custom Search Engine!

The nav code that I uploaded ages ago to Google Public Service Search is broken. Although Public Service Search will still work, you can't make any changes; Google has discontinued support for administering Public Service Search, directing us to Google Custom Search Engine (CSE) instead.

These CSEs are cool; I've bookmarked several having to do with Transportation Agencies:

• Public Transit Agencies Search Engine
• State DOT Search Engine
• UTC Search Engine
• MPO Search Engine
• LTAP Center Search Engine

Apparently, free embedded search on a site is also managed through CSE.

I used our department account (username systems@techtransfer.berkeley.edu, password the usual) to configure a CSE.

Then on our web server I edited the search code for our pages with the new code (new values for hidden inputs in the search form). If you have your search form laid out in tables, as we do, you need to peer closely at Google's new code and make the necessary modifications by hand, rather than just cut'n'paste.

A big change is that the search results are in an iframe within a page hosted on our server.

I used the CSE control panel to change the appearance of the results, though I've had no luck making them narrower to fit inside our nested tables.

The page for our CSE can be found by logging in at:

http://www.google.com/coop/manage/cse

Edits Jan. 22

Home Page:
added dates to Pavement Pres and Rail Safety announcements
training/:
Guide to Services no longer "New!"
contextsensitive/:
removed listing for Jan 9-10 workshop

To Do

• Visit Google Webmaster Diagnostics and fix problems.
• Fix 404s
• clean up my webstats scripts folders on www
  • add strings to findrobots:
    • popup_window
    • _vti_
    • MSOffice
    • errors.php

Fake hacker targets?

Today I created the following empty files:

• /display.php
• /errors.php
• /popup_window.php

these are often requested by script kiddies (display.php thousands of times a month); now we are serving empty docs instead of returning 404 errors.

Is this an improvement?

For us, it means fewer lines in the error logs, and more useful Analog reports.

Does it cause hassle for script kiddies? Presumably their script shows them all non-404 results; will they spend a few seconds trying to figure out our empty doc? And is it dangerous to attract this kind of attention?

Update January 7, 2008:

My colleague Jon Felder says "do it," so I'm adding:

• /_vti_bin/owssvr.dll
• /_vti_bin/shtml.exe/_vti_rpc
• /_vti_inf.html
• /account.php
• /calendar.php
• /cart_content.php
• /confirmUnsubscription.php
• /errors.php
• /fax_form.php
• /freestuff/account.php
• /freestuff/cart_content.php
• /freestuff/popup_window.php
• /freestuff/squirrelcart/js/cart_content.php
• /freestuff/squirrelcart/js/popup_window.php
• /freestuff/squirrelcart/js/squirrelcart/cart_content.php
• /freestuff/squirrelcart/popup_window.php
• /freestuff/squirrelcart/squirrelcart/cart_content.php
• /MSOffice/cltreq.asp
• /newsletter/05-3/errors.php
• /newsletter/confirmUnsubscription.php
• /newsletter/errors.php
• /newsletter/newsletter.php
• /newsletter/newsletter/newsletter.php
• /popup_window.php
• /squirrelcart/cart_content.php
• /squirrelcart/popup_window.php
• /store.php
• /test.php

HAH! Take that, h4x0r!

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