After my recent Referer Spam attacks I've been checking my logs and AWStats reports daily. I noticed that occasionally I'd get people requesting pages with incorrect suffixes. i.e. foo.ht or bar.|id| (some of these are probably spammers too). A "feature" of Blosxom is that it will still serve the page with the default layout or flavour. This feature causes a not too helpful and ugly error message to be displayed on the top of the page:
Error: I'm afraid this is the first I've heard of an "ht" flavoured Blosxom. Try dropping the "/+ht" bit from the end of the URL.
Of course removing the suffix from the URL doesn't usually work; the client is served with an empty (but flavoured) page. So I though a better solution would be to have Blosxom serve my default_flavour whenever the flavour couldn't be identified. A little Googling later turned up this Blosxom mod by James Vasille. James explicitly loads a flavour file named "default" whenever the requested flavour can't be found.
For my site it is more appropriate to serve the $default_flavour when the requested flavour can't be found. That way I didn't have copy/create head.default, foot.default, etc files. So my code change is almost the same as James':
$template = sub {
my ($path, $chunk, $flavour) = @_;
do {
return join '', <$fh> if $fh->open("< $datadir/$path/$chunk.$flavour");
} while ($path =~ s/(/*[^/]*)$// and $1);
# Begin added code
do {
return join '', <$fh> if $fh->open("< $datadir/$path/$chunk.$default_flavour");
} while ($path =~ s/(/*[^/]*)$// and $1);
# End added code
return join '', ($template{$flavour}{$chunk} || $template{error}{$chunk} || '');
};
So now a less ugly page will be provided when an unknown suffix/flavour is requested.