Update: They’ve fixed the crawler to stop reporting a referrer, so my logs are now wonderfully clean again. Thanks guys.
It appears I’ve been syndicated on IrishBlogs.ie. What brought this to my attention was the number of hits I got yesterday and today with that site as the referrer. No-one actually asked me about this, which I thought was a bit odd. Strictly I think they’re probably on solid enough ground in that they’re just quoting excerpts and they’re giving proper attribution, but an email would have been nice. I’m not bothered by it as such, just surprised. To be honest I’m not sure why a wider audience would want to read the stuff I churn out here, but if someone disagrees I won’t stand in their way.
Unfortunately it doesn’t appear as if anyone does disagree. On closer inspection of those referrer logs I found that the requests were all coming from a single IP address. It turns out the bot that harvests my atom feed twice an hour is sending a bogus referrer header to spam my logs. Since many people publish their logs it can be a valuable but dubious advertising method to put your site’s address in referrer headers. I’ve also seen this done innocently by well-meaning bot writers who don’t know any better, so we might hold off on the flames until I can contact them about fixing it.