I was browsing the other day and visited the website of Goldsmiths, the UK jeweller, only to be presented with the following:

Application Firewall Alert

Your request triggered an alert! If you feel that you have received this page in error, please contact the administrator of this web site.

I laughed, thinking that their website had gone done in what must be a really profitable period for them – yes, I can be evil sometimes.

I tried again today, and the same thing, so checked Google’s cache, which was dated today and displayed correctly. I also tried viewing the website from a UK proxy and then switched browser – from Flock to Safari. Bingo, it works in Safari… and Firefox… and Opera… wow, and even IE!

So why doesn’t the Goldsmiths website like Flock?

Because the admins have never heard of it and they’re trying to ban bots from the site perhaps?

So next step, check Opera Mini on my Palm TX… yep, it works ok. Let’s write a scraper script and see what happens…

Weird, that works. Anyone got a clue?