RPC Relay HTML appearing in stats

By Michael Dorausch, D.C.

This is a non-chiropractor related post, so excuse me for a few moments while I cover something webmasters may be doing some searches on. I was checking the stats for planetchiropractic.com earlier today, and I noticed an HTML file (rpc_relay.html) appearing in the list of popular URLs for the site.

I hadn’t seen this particular HTML file appearing before so I initially suspected foul play. The file was amongst the top 10 most frequently accessed URLs appearing on the site so I was obviously curious to figure out what it was.

After logging in to the server I remembered that over the weekend I activated Google’s friend connect which required me adding to HTML files to the website root dir. One of those files is the rpc_relay.html files. I had not bothered to look at the content of the HTML file until now and it turns out it’s simply a JavaScript for the friend connect service wrapped in HTML. It’s a simple one line file.

It will be interesting to see at the end of the month how high that file ranks on the list of top page URLs for the site. I imagine the script is called every time someone visits the page, which will likely result in a lot of activity for that particular file.

So if you are checking your web stats and wondering where the RPC relay file came from, go forget you or someone else on your webmaster team may have uploaded the files when setting up your sites friend connect account.

As far as the service goes, nothing to report yet that’s really earth shattering, it works pretty cool and there are several members already signed up and appearing on the homepage.