I’ve modified my htaccess file to block known site leeching (aka ‘offline browsing’) programs from the site for bandwidth reasons – there are not very many (if any) legitimate users making use of these programs – they don’t even make it into my AWStats list of top useragents – but the bandwidth usage of these programs can be quite significant. Take every page as 40kb, multiply that by 300+ posts and suddenly you have 12Mb bandwidth per leech. I didn’t even think it was a problem on this site until I saw something called LinkWalker while I was looking at my raw site log. A quick googling confirmed that LinkWalker is a particularly bandwidth-sapping leech program Mod_rewrite to the rescue, problem solved!