Some links that I “Stumbled Upon”
10 Universities Offering Free Writing Courses Online
Maximum Bacon Capacity (I know. But I love Bacon.)
Blue-Eyed people are all related
Amazingly long list of Sci-Fi Lists
More later…
Archives for January 2008
WTF? Pageview Bloat?
January 28, 2008 by
I installed the new theme last week. Last Thursday in fact. Just 4 days ago. If you’ll look at my popular posts on the homepage, you’ll notice that the most popular post is one I wrote way back in September of 2006 called Intel, UC Santa Barbara Develop Laser Processor. You’d think it was a great post or something, not the regurgitation of news that it really is. So, why is it at the top of my popular posts list? According to the popularity contest plugin, it’s gotten over 11,000 pageviews since last Thursday. Impressive, no?
Not really. You see, according to both Statcounter and Google Analytics, this site has only had about 15,000 pageviews as a whole for the entire month of January. According to Analytics, that post has only received 12 pageviews in the last 30 days. That post is suffering from some major pageview bloat. And I can’t figure out why. It’s done that for as long as I can remember and it just won’t stop. I’ve checked everything that I can think of and still cannot figure it out. I’ve looked for a scraper that would be opening it up in a frame, but when I search for unique text from the post, the only result is my site.
So, I’m gonna ask you. Have you ever had an issue like this? Any ideas on fixing it?
How Many Neighbors Do You Have?
January 28, 2008 by
I found out that I have about 600 neighbors. No, I don’t live in a major apartment building. I’m talking about the server that I host this site on.  Thanks to a post by Max at ZedoMax, I found a site called myIPneighbors.com. It’s a reverse IP domain lookup. Type in your domain and hit enter. Up comes a list of all the other domains that are hosted on the same domain. In other words, all the other domains that are being hosted on the same server!
When I punch in this domain, it comes up with 609. Some of those domains are mine (about 10), but the rest are not. So, what do you think happens when one of those domains gets dugg? Or when one of them suddenly becomes very popular because of the video that they posted on YouTube? Even if my site is getting exactly the same traffic as it did yesterday, it’s going to be exponentially slower. At the bottom of my old theme, I had the little doodad that would tell me (and you) how many queries were done to the database and how long it took to execute those. On the old theme, it was about 50 queries and usually less than 10 seconds. But on occasion, I saw it hit upwards of 45 and 50 seconds and on a few rare occasions, over 1 minute. Not because my site was seeing an above average load, but because someone else on the same server was.
I hadn’t really given it much though, because at this point, I don’t really want to shell out for a dedicated server. I figured it had to just be dealt with and go from there. Well, when I found this site, I got curious. This site is hosted on a shared server by GoDaddy. Another of my sites is hosted on 1&1 on a shared server. How many total sites are hosted on that sever compared to the 609 on the godaddy server? 13.
Maybe it’s time to switch around a little. Did I mention that with every account through 1&1 you get two free domains? You never pay for the domain or its renewal as long as you have the hosting account on 1&1. Of course, to take advantage of that, you have to have a hosting account, so you’ll be paying extra to get just the domains.
I also noticed another interesting use of myIPneighbors.com. If you want to know what some of your competitors are doing, look up their domain. If they have a dedicated server, then the resulting list is most likely the other sites that they are working on.
So, how many neighbors does your site have?
No Comments, No Pings, Non-existent?
After editing the problem post to remove comments and pings, it seems to have disappeared completely from the site. Like deleted disappeared. Not existing. Gone.
I’m going to publish this post then go back and edit it to not allow comments or pings. We’ll see what happens.
Update: Ok, I removed comments and pings on this post and it stayed. Not a clue what happened to the other one. I’ll have to go rummaging around the database and see if it is still there at all. There isn’t a way to delete a post from the edit window. At least not that I can see, so it must be some sort of bug.
P.S. I’ve opened up comments and pings on this post again.