Robots.txt and Web Colours

A couple of things I've found useful in getting this site up and running are the very excellent HEX to RGB and rgb to hex Color Converter and the Robots.txt Checker.

The HEX/RGB colour converter is useful for transforming colours backwards and forwards from graphics applications which show the individual (R)ed, (G)reen and (B)lue colours (for example 187,219,219) rather than #BBDBDB.

As for the Robots.txt Checker, that's useful for making sure that my robots.txt file is correct and well formed. Robots.txt (not robot.txt as I've seen mentioned on the web!) is useful for making sure that search engines only "crawl" (or read) the parts of my site that I want them to crawl. Telling them to ignore areas of the site that I don't want crawled not only helps to ensure that only relevant stuff is trawled by the search engines but also means that I can keep bandwidth costs down by specifically exlcuding folders that may contain big files. An added bonus is that you can target specific search engines, for example the Google Image crawler could be blocked, thus stopping the bandwidth drain that can cause!

One interesting thing that comes out of searching for information on robots.txt is this article about the robots.txt file for whitehouse.gov. It would appear that someone at the whitehouse, possibly a well meaning tech-bod, has decided that search engines shouldn't be able to find anything Iraq related from whitehouse.gov. It's a whitehouse-wash! ;-)