robots.txt

I
just finished the formal lecture-part of the course Projects in
non-commutative geometry (btw. I am completely exhausted after this
afternoon\’s session but hopeful that some students actually may do
something with my crazy ideas), springtime seems to have arrived and
next week the easter-vacation starts so it may be time to have some fun
like making a new webpage (yes, again…). At the moment the main
matrix.ua.ac.be page is not really up to standards
and Raf and Hans will be using it soon for the information about the
Liegrits-project (at the moment they just have a beautiful logo). My aim is to make the main page to be the
starting page of the geoMetry site
(guess what M stands for ?) on which I want
to collect as much information as possible on non-commutative geometry.
To get at that info I plan to set some spiders or bots or
scrapers loose on the web (this is just an excuse to force myself
to learn Perl). But it seems one has to follow strict ethical guidelines
in doing so. One of the first sites I want to spider is clearly the arXiv but they have
a scary Robots Beware page! I don\’t know whether their
robots.txt file will allow me to get at any of
their goodies. In a robots.txt file the webmaster can put the
directories on his/her site which are off limits to robots and as I
don\’t want to do anything that may cause that the arXiv is no longer
available to me (or even worse, to the whole department) I better follow
these guidelines. First site on my list to study tomorrow will be The
Web Robots Pages …