Earth Notes: On Website Technicals (2025-12)

Today I have been doing some early preparation for data gathering for the End Of Month and End Of Year. That properly starts once the mid-evening supply/gneration meters are manually read, and maybe finishes tomorrow afternoon once all the per-month datasets are checked in, and per-year values and calculations are captured too.

Once all that is in place, a snapshot of the site and data can usefully be pushed to off-site storage and or public repositories as appropriate.

There are usually a few straggling minor data captures and corrections over the following few days, but no one other than me will notice...

I am also slightly jumping the gun and bumping the site copyright year. I know how to live..

Ad Threshold

After noon and some dithering, EOU passed an important threshold for AdSense. So I have turned off ads for almost all m-dot 'lite' pages as they rebuild so as to substantially reduce mean page weight.

I have added a channel-level podcast:person entry to the podcast (main and 'lite') feeds.

<podcast:person>Damon Hart-Davis</podcast:person>

Before this change, with no new podcast material since 2025-10-13, the greedy-feeders stats/defence looked like:

# Greedy podcast feed pullers: keys are MD5 hashed User-Agent.
# A non-empty txt map lookup of the %{md5:%{HTTP:User-Agent}} means bad!
# Built: 2025-12-28T10:14+00:00 (UTC)
# MAXHITSPERUAPERDAY: 10
# MAXUAS: 25
#----------------
# request-count User-Agent
# MD5hash approx-hits-per-day
#----------------
# 474 iTMS
97f76eb7e02c5ff923e1198ff1c288cd 474
# 308 Podbean/FeedUpdat
54e0e9df937b06cc83fab29f44c02b7f 308
# 203 Spotify/1.0
4582d9bdbcef42af27d89da91c6eb804 203
# 138 Google-Podcast
8dea568b39db0451edd6b30f29238eaf 138
# 56 -
d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e 56
# 51 Amazon Music Podc
d69be2563c9f1929edf2906d41809aea 51
# 34 MuckRackFeedParse
62b46fff1cf5f8af7b4b37a2f783b57a 34
# 19 itms
2e7f714a929b3f52f3c094710819a99a 19
# 12 axios/1.6.8
b534882134248c9a5957e0c011a37037 12
# 11 FeedMaster/4.1
dca30fcc6f45af71c2825280bebba04d 11
# 10 Mozilla/5.0 (Wind
6b9a00393fb1607b0ada13520f814ab5 10
# 10 axios/1.11.0
5c8ae194a6f98a725c992886f3da6e04 10

The updated RSS feeds were checked with Cast Feed Validator.

I have observed problems with, for example, audio on the m-dot site refusing to fetch the .vtt captions, complaining Not same-origin.

An access-control-allow-origin: * header is sent with VTT responses, but in this case the browser is not even trying to fetch the file.

I have added an crossorigin=anonymous attribute (where there is a VTT file available) to generated audio tags for non-desktop (eg m-dot) pages that will be making a cross-domain request back to the www-dot desktop site.

That allowed the VTT file to be fetched (hurrah), but now all the media (eg Opus, MP3) files are complaining CORS Missing Allow Origin.

I am going to have to set the access-control-allow-origin: * header for any media file that the audio tag (and in due course video) may want to play. That should be safe for all static-served MIME-type audio/* (and in due course video/*) content.

So as a first step to keep things simple, the crossorigin=anonymous attribute should be unconditionally added to all generated non-desktop audio tags.

Adjusting the Apache config for the www. (and static.) sites for involves as a minimum something like:

<IfModule mod_headers.c>
    <Location /img>
        Header set Access-Control-Allow-Origin "*"
    </Location>
</IfModule>

This will burden non audio/video responses with an extra header, so refining it would save bandwidth at a little server CPU cost, eg:

SetEnvIf Content-Type "^((audio)|(video))/.*" TYPE_AV
<IfModule mod_headers.c>
    <Location /img>
        Header set Access-Control-Allow-Origin "*" env=TYPE_AV
    </Location>
</IfModule>

The auto-generated non-desktop video tags are getting the same new crossorigin=anonymous attribute.

Closed captioning for m-dot video is now reported to work by one other person!

It seems that an empty attribute value will do for crossorigin, thus saving a few bytes!

SVN repo backup command

In a few days I want to remember to run (and copy the result off-site):

tar vcfJ SVN-general-www.hd.org.20260102.tar.xz --sort=name general/www.hd.org/