Pink as an April Fool’s joke is old.
And I’m hungry.
Quote of the Moment
Brandon: feed my brain now* Seth offers ranch Snackers instead
Brandon: NO DEAL
Brandon: ooo
Brandon: I sound mean in all caps -Brandon
MySpace is the scourge of the Internet.
In my recent push to optimize the bandwidth-sucking on my site, I went through my access logs to try to rip out the hotlinkers. Some of the files that were in my top bandwidth users didn’t seem like they should be getting used that often! Most notably… my prom pictures?!?
So I fired up the log viewer; here are some excerpts:
71.48.106.151 - - [05/Mar/2006:18:08:51 -0500] "GET /photos/2005%20Prom%20with%20Kristen/prom.jpg HTTP/1.1" 200 61706 "http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendid=2376569" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1)" "-"This continued for pages. Dozens of people on MySpace hotlinking to my prom pictures! I couldn’t really even figure out why… comments ranged from “{naked Barbie picture} + {my prom picture} = happy” to “Look at this prom picture of me! {my prom picture}”.
68.47.34.249 - - [05/Mar/2006:20:36:14 -0500] "GET /photos/2005%20Prom%20with%20Kristen/dance.jpg HTTP/1.1" 200 71466 "http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendid=20532237" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; (R1 1.5); .NET CLR 1.1.4322)" "-"
Obviously, it’s because Kristen is gorgeous and all the little MySpace peons wanted to pretend that they looked like her / dated her. But don’t hotlink her! I did notice that I’m on the first page of Google Image Search for ‘prom’. I guess that’s partially the culprit.
I started off by just blocking the three or four worst-offending sites. MySpace, some photo-sharing site, and a couple foreign sites. The prom picture alone pulled over 300MB of bandwidth by itself, and Cao pulled another couple hundred. Rawr 
I think…
…I need to get cracking on distributing these Kubuntu CDs Riddell sent me.
I suspect the box in which he sent them is a Magic Box that replenishes the supply whenever I am not looking.
DokuWiki: an Undiscovered Gem
I finished the soft launch of the ZetaBoards Documentation Project today, and have to say that DokuWiki is hands-down the best wiki software I have ever used, installed, or written with. From MediaWiki to MoinMoin to phpWiki, DokuWiki offers more features, a cleaner setup, and easier use.
I took our new website template and ported it to DokuWiki in a matter of hours. And most of that time was spent redoing part of the header to add more functionality that the website didn’t need. Things worked just by dropping in a few PHP tags here and there. The only other software this easy to skin is WordPress.
There are a few hundred plugins written for DokuWiki, and the syntax is extremely simple should I choose to make more. I picked a couple and installed them on our installation in about 20 minutes. The notes plugin is amazing. The entire codebase is PHP-Doc’d so I can understand what everything does, and make changes where I need them!
The 2005-9 release I was using lacked a little bit on user management, but that’s all been fixed with the 2006-3 release that I just finished upgrading to. I have full control on access permissions, user groups, everything. And the new release also added some great AJAX goodness like an AJAX quicksearch. I also successfully installed aspell to my home directory and now the AJAX spellcheck it features works flawlessly.
There are no databases needed; it’s all flat-file and fast. I can move the directory around and nothing breaks; all that’s needed are some CHMODs. It’s drop-dead simple, gorgeous, well-written, featureful, and fast. How does it get better than this?
If you need a wiki software, this is the one for you.
Oops
I just realized, after a year and a half, that when making my smilies for this blog in Fireworks, I saved them as Fireworks PNGs instead of normal PNGs. That makes them about 30K per smiley, instead of 1K. Just a small mistake… I used 75MB over 200MB of bandwidth last month just on smilies!
Oops.