Interactive Rich Media

Sometimes there are files on a hosted server which can not be deleted by FTP even if you are logged in as the domain administrator. This happens for example when you upload a file using PHP. These files will be marked as being owned by the Apache (or Fast-CGI) user. So when you log into the FTP or the Plesk or Confixx desktop with your own user id, you can’t delete or change the files PHP has uploaded as they are owned by another user.

The only way to delete or change these files is to do it by a PHP script. In PHP you delete files by calling the unlink function.

To delete the file test.txt we simply run a PHP script that is located in the same directory.

<?php
$myFile = “test.txt”;
unlink($myFile);
?>

I had this problem a few days ago when I tried to delete an old wordpress installation on a server and it was not possible to delete the uploads folder cretaed by the wordpress application.

WWW Robots (also called wanderers or spiders) are programs that traverse many pages in the World Wide Web by recursively retrieving linked pages. For various reasons robots are not always welcome to access certain web pages.

A simple method used to exclude robots from a server is to create a file on the server which specifies an access policy for robots. This file must be accessible via HTTP on the local URL “/robots.txt”. The contents of this file uses two records: user-agent and disallow.

It is not an official standard backed by a standards body, or owned by any commercial organisation. It is not enforced by anybody, and there no guarantee that all current and future robots will use it. Consider it a common facility the majority of robot authors offer the WWW community to protect WWW server against unwanted accesses by their robots.

The latest version of this document can be found on http://www.robotstxt.org/orig.html.