Keith Devens .com

Unfortunately, the referer header seems to be becoming less useful by the day. There is a trend for RSS readers and aggregator applications to use the application's homepage as the referer url. ... The user-agent header is right there for the very purpose of expressing information about the program fetching the url.

Exactly, which is why I simply use the user-agent field to identify my aggregator, and have resisted the temptation to fake the referer field.

Permalink | 1 Comment | Tags: Programming | id 2716

10:26 (utc-4)

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I hate seeing the url of the newsreader's website in my referrer logs also... thanks for taking this effort on, or at least saying something about it publicly.

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Tuesday, September 3, 2002

Bad uses of referrer logs

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