website

Any posts more directly connected to the upkeep, maintenance, and backend fiddling around of my website/blog and whatever platforms it’s running on at any particular moment.

Fun with bandwidth

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Since getting Slashdotted, my bandwidth has been going through the roof. On an account rated for 5Gb/month of data transfer, that on a normal month would use roughly half that amount, I hit about 90Gb of data in the last five days of October, and over the first four days of November have already hit about 40Gb of traffic. Crazy.

After realizing this, I did a bit of investigating, and realized that each of the posts that have been getting the most traffic (Even Microsoft wants G5s and Of Blogging and Unemployment) have picked up so many comments that they were up to ~300kb each! At that rate, each page would only need to be loaded three times to produce 1Mb of data transfer — and with the amount of traffic I’ve been getting, that number grows quickly.

In an attempt to try to slow things down a bit, then, I’ve had to both disable any new comments on those posts, and disable the display of the comments I’ve already received, which brought each of the two pages down to around 60k. Turning TrackBack pings off brought the page size down even more, to around 6k each — far better. If things die down, I hope to be able to re-enable at least the display of the TrackBack pings, if not the comments (some of them are pretty entertaining, if not rational) next month sometime. Until then, though (and quite possibly permanently), they’ll have to stay ping- and comment-free.

People must like my design

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One of the many things that I’ve enjoyed about the numerous comments I’ve received over the past few days is that I’ve gotten quite a few compliments on my site design. As I’m generally not much of a designer (trust me on this one — my previous attempts were not horrid, but certainly not great), that’s always a nice compliment to get.

However, there is a potential downside to this that I hadn’t foreseen — that being people ripping off your site design.

The top of the page

The bottom of the page

Even better (or worse, depending on how you look at it) is how I found out. Normally, things like this aren’t always easy to spot. I found out simply because as I was looking through my referrer logs, I noticed a link that I hadn’t seen before — not uncommon over the past couple days — only it didn’t seem to be pointing to one of my pages. Instead, it appeared to be pointing to itself. Odd.

So I bounced over to take a look. Imagine my surprise when I found my very own site design staring me in the face! I was not at all happy. Then I pulled up the source code for the site — and started laughing. Just to give you an idea:

  1. The title of the page is still ‘eclecticism’.
  2. The meta tags still hold all of my information: this site’s tagline, RSS feed, and FOAF file.
  3. The code has been mangled by Microsoft FrontPage 5.0 — always the hallmark of a top-notch site designer. ;)
  4. The trackback RDF data for my posts is still in the page.
  5. While the images in the “ad banner” at the bottom of the page have been replaced, the title arguments are still the same.
  6. It still has the TypePad statistics tracking code at the bottom of the page (which is why it showed up in my referrer logs).

The best part of all of those, though, was that he’d not altered the CSS stylesheet at all — so he was hotlinking the banner image of the Seattle skyline that I use (while it was displaying on his site, he was still pulling it off of my images directory here on TypePad)!

So, in an effort to be polite, I searched around the site for an e-mail contact link so that I could ask him to take my design down. Unfortunately, he hasn’t provided one. So I’ve been forced to resort to slightly more drastic means.

A quick recode of my stylesheet to replace my banner image here on this site with an identical one, so that it won’t be disturbed, and a little bit of quick and dirty Photoshop work on the image that he’s linking to, and instead of my skyline graphic, he now has a banner proudly displaying to the world that ~~his site design was stolen from me~~.

Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery. But this — this was just clumsy, stupid, and poorly executed. I hope he finds another design soon. Just watch your referrer logs — his next design just might be yours!

(In addition to my screenshots, Phil has provided .pdf screencaptures on his site — thanks!)

Ack!

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After a full week’s work, I did manage to get my webserver up and running again, complete with upgrades, so djwudi.com, hanscomfamily.com, and geekmuffin.com are all active again, and starting to regain content.

I am still having one issue, unfortunately. I’ve tried to install both Image::Magick and NetPBM (two image-processing libraries), but for some reason MovableType isn’t seeing either. This means that when uploading images to the MT install on my server, MT doesn’t give the options to resize the images, automatically create thumbnails, etc. Everything else is working beautifully, this is the only aspect that’s still giving me issues. Grr.

The other downside is that I’m now facing RSS overload, as I haven’t paid any attention to NetNewsWire for the past few days. I’m currently looking at 691 unread posts to go through. Yikes!

Now on LiveJournal – me!

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I only found this out a short time ago, but it appears that the online journaling site LiveJournal has limited support for picking up RSS feeds. As it turns out, someone added Eclecticism to their list of available feeds — so if there are any LiveJournal users who stop by here at any time, you can add me to your ‘friends’ list by adding [woody_eclectic].

I just wish there were a way for me to figure out who all had me added. According to the information page, there are three LiveJournal users who have me in their friends list. I know who two are…but who’s the mysterious third?

Maybe I’ve got a secret admirer.

Ooooooh.

iTMS Link Maker spewing popups?

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It looks like the extra code that Apple supplies when creating links with the iTMS Link Maker is causing pop-ups to appear in some browsers. This is the text of an e-mail I got tonight, and the response I gave. Has anyone else seen this happening, or are there any other ideas of what might be going on? Are new updated versions of IE that have been patched due to the Eolas lawsuit already in the wild?

On Saturday, Oct 18, 2003, at 19:14 US/Pacific, Owen van Dijk wrote:

Hello Michael,

Through a link I stumbled on your weblog. Suddenly I got a popup saying if wanted to install the “iTunes detector” from Apple. I have never heard of such a plugin, not on a PC ( I use windows xp, ie6 ) and not on a mac ( I am also the lucky owner of a powerbook 12\” :) ) could you please explain what this plugin does or why it is embedded in your site?

Wow. Good question.

First off — I’m really sorry about a pop-up showing up! I had no idea that would happen (and, to be entirely honest, I’m not entirely sure why it happened…but I can guess).

With Apple’s release of iTunes for the PC and the revamping of the iTunes Music Store, they’ve made it easier to link directly to items inside the iTunes Music Store. There are two ways of doing this — either with a simple link (like INXS Need You Tonight), or with a more complex link that’s generated using their iTunes Link Maker.

When you create a link with the iTunes Link Maker, it generates two snippets of code — one for the link itself, and one to put in the head of your html page. According to Apple, “The first text box on this page contains code to include in the HEAD section of your HTML (once per page) to detect if iTunes is present or not. This will cause your links to behave intelligently if iTunes is not installed on the user’s computer.” Since I added a link to the iTMS at the bottom of my page (down with the Amazon links), I also added that snippet to the page.

My guess is that that’s what causing the popup to show up on your browser. I’m not entirely sure why you’re getting a popup asking for confirmation, unless it is related to the recent changes being made in IE due to the Eolas patent suit against Microsoft (though I wasn’t aware that they’d actually started distributing changed versions of IE yet).

In either case, that’s something that I don’t want my visitors to have to deal with, so I’ll be taking that code out of there. Thanks much for letting me know about it!

The offending code has been removed from my pages, along with the iTMS link that I had in the ad box at the bottom of the pages. Bummer, but as long as the simple style of linking works, I’ll be able to play with it whenever I want to.

testy.littleville.com

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I’ve been having an odd problem that I’ve noticed in the past, but am just now starting to attempt to track down, in that my server keeps insisting that its domain name is ‘testy.littleville.com’ rather than ‘www.djwudi.com’. Here’s a copy of the nslookup results for djwudi.com…

Server: dsl231-041-022.sea1.dsl.speakeasy.net
Address: 216.231.41.22

Non-authoritative answer:
Name: djwudi.com
Address: 216.231.44.57

…and one for the nslookup results for the server’s IP address…

Server: dsl231-041-022.sea1.dsl.speakeasy.net
Address: 216.231.41.22

Name: testy.littleville.com
Address: 216.231.44.57

I spent some time trying to track down where that particular domain name was coming from (configuration files on my server? oddness with speakeasy.net, ZoneEdit [who handle my DNS services ], or MicroMax Information Services [who I registered my domain through ]?) with no luck until I did a whois on the littleville.com domain and got the following:

Domain Name: LITTLEVILLE.COM
Registrar: NETWORK SOLUTIONS, INC.
Whois Server: whois.networksolutions.com
Referral URL: http://www.networksolutions.com
Name Server: NS2.SPEAKEASY.NET
Name Server: NS1.SPEAKEASY.NET
Status: ACTIVE
Updated Date: 11-mar-2003
Creation Date: 23-jul-1999
Expiration Date: 23-jul-2008

Odd, as I haven’t ever dealt directly with Network Solutions. So, at a loss as to whether or not there’s anything that I can do to solve this, I’ve sent a plea for help with all of the above information to both Network Solutions and Speakeasy.net. Hopefully this gets resolved soon — it doesn’t seem to cause major issues, but it has bit me a couple times during my setup process, and I’d be much happier if my machine knew what its name was!

Update: Turns out it was a simple tweak on Speakeasy’s end:

Speakeasy controls the reverse DNS entries on all of its IP space. When an IP is reclaimed and assigned to a new customer the reverse IP is not updated to the Speakeasy standard.

I have made the needed changes to reflect your domain.

These changes will take effect and begin propagating during our next nameserver update/reload. This happens six times daily, at 11, 3 and 7 pm and am pst.

By the time I got home and found the e-mail, the change had gone through, and my server now correctly identifies itself as djwudi.com. Rock on — thanks, Speakeasy!

Slight IMAP issues

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Work keeps progressing on re-creating the djwudi.com webserver. Last night’s project was setting it up as a working mailserver using sendmail and IMAP. Much progress was made, and I’m just facing one last issue that I can’t resolve, and if there’s anyone out there who might understand a bit more of this end of things than I do, assistance would be greatly appreciated.

I have sendmail and IMAP working for the most part — I can send mail from the server from the command line using the mail command, the server is receiving e-mail, and I can log into the server via IMAP using Mail.app from my G5 to check my e-mail in the account that I set up. However, I’m having no luck in sending e-mail ~~through the IMAP connection~~ from my G5. Every configuration setting I’ve tried just results in an error of one sort or another (either the server refusing connections or (null) errors after sitting and waiting for a while). At this point, I’m more or less stumped.

The steps I went through last night to get the mail side of things set up (so far) are detailed on my rebuilding djwudi.com post. If anyone could give me some pointers, I’d greatly appreciate it!

Update: With a little more work and some pointers from Phil, I got it. Rock on. Progress!