As a slowly advancing ‘project’ to entertain and teach myself with, I’ve been putting together a (currently) lackluster site for all the music files I’ve thrown together since 2001. WhyFacts.AnneMarkis.com. Deciding I could use more MVC and PHP in my life, I’m using cakePHP to help me along. So far, I’ve managed to figure out how to set up the database tables, the CSS, and run ‘cake bake all.’ With a little tweaking here and there, that’s pretty much where I am now: a generated app that allows you to index/view/add/edit/delete albums/music/comments.
CakePHP’s navigation is predictable enough – whyfacts.annemarkis.com/musics/ shows the list of all the music files I put in. whyfacts.annemarkis.com/musics/delete/2 goes ahead and calls the delete function in the music controller and remove the database entry for song #2. I knew having absolutely no restrictions was kind of dumb, but since I also knew I was just about the only one to visit WhyFacts, restricting access wasn’t a pressing matter. In typical Anne style, I merrily went along my way and added a few albums to which I added a few songs, and was feeling pretty good about things for a while, content with using the scaffolding cake bake had gone and made for me, not really wanting to remove it yet.
The one day I visited it and nothing was there – no albums, not music, not even the one measly comment I made to myself. It was all gone. Furious, my mind raced, asking myself who the jerk was that went in and deleted everything. It seemed unnaturally malicious. Two seconds later and I was looking at the access logs for the site and saw this:
It's almost like it's mocking me
The googlebot! It had crawled its way in and automatically used those URL’s to call the controller’s delete function on EVERYTHING. Needless to say, you can no longer visit those edit and delete parts of WhyFacts and do anything. I’ve learned. Because the googlebot will always come back – it always has the last word. Lesson learned.