Quote of the Moment

My cat is my best friend most of the time, which is probably kind of sad. Some days we hang out and then I go someplace with Chase or whoever, and twenty minutes later I'll say "man, I miss Kichi."

And then I sit in silence pondering my patheticness. -Barret
(moar?)

Itchy Scratchy

22
May
4 Comments

The redesign itch is definitely hitting for my site, with summer here and all. If ZetaBoards weren't eating all my time, I'd get onto it. I have some nice ideas, though, including:

  • Liquid layout (finally)
  • More emphasis on the site sections that get used a lot (blog, code) and less emphasis for the others (photos, about)
  • More graphic use
  • Some AJAX here-and-there (now that I sat down and learned the basics)
  • More "integration" with some of the things I play with on the internet (Ubuntu, Digg, ZetaBoards)

Now if I can only find the time…

An unfortunate series of events

7
May
17 Comments

So you'd never believe the events that led up to this… but I just deleted my entire website. I was able to save two things: the MySQL dbs, and ZetaBoards stuff. Pretty much everything else is toast. So it will be a bit sketchy around here while I rebuild.

:'( 

The results are in

1
May
5 Comments

March

7165 unique visitors that made a total of 13520 visits.

Total Bandwidth Used: 3.62 GB

April

8475 unique visitors, an increase of 18%, that made a total of 15849 visits, an increase of 17%.

Total Bandwidth Used: 2.22 GB

This represents a savings of almost 39%. This is due nearly completely to two things:

  1. Blocking hotlinking from my photos
  2. Optimizing my blog images (header + smilies)

Optimization is totally, totally worth it. Give it a try!

MySpace is the scourge of the Internet.

27
March
29 Comments

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)" "-"
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)" "-"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}”.

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 :)


Read the rest of this thought »

Oops

25
March
3 Comments

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.

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