Meta: December 2004 Archives
Once in a while I put a song in the Jukebox. Some songs are popular, others won't be downloaded at all. That's your choice. Today I put a file in the box of which I was sure that it would be popular. Why? Because the famous Boing Boing links to it.
And while I have enough bandwith left for this month, I had no idea what to expect. 10 downloads? 100 downloads? 1000 downloads? More? In such a case, it is wise to monitor the trafic.
At this moment the file has been downloaded 170 times and has generated 835 Mb trafic on a little bit more than two hours:
If the downloads stay at this level, I can easily keep on sharing the file; but you never know what to expect when America gets active the next hours. I will keep on monitoring...
[Update 2004.12.30]: The biggest peak is over, everything is quite now. The file only consumed 1,5 Gb bandwidth:
A little bit of copy and paste work, and my Flickr page is up and running. At the moment it contains the same images in the same low resolution ---400x300--- as the original Brain Pics contained, but I will add more and higher quality photos soon.
I will remove the Brain Pics section from this site, and link to the Flickr site instead. For a DIY guy like me this is a big step, but Flickr offers so many advantages and features, that I decided to outsource this feature to them.
After the recent messages about comment spam, I have upgraded both Movable Type and MT-Blacklist. Not that my comment spam problem became bigger, since my setup is different enough from the regular MT site to stop them. I have renamed my comment script, and ---more important--- I force commenters to preview. This alone blocks all spam comming in through the comments.
The problem is that once in a while I receive spam through the trackback interface. Since trackbacks ---comments on my writings left on other sites--- are always generated automatically, I have no way to force a preview and have to use the default workflow. As a result, once in a while a spammer gets through and manages to place many spam on my site before I have the time to add his URL to the blacklist. Of course, after that all spam is deleted with a single click.
Conclusion: So far I am still winning the spam war, but only because I am on top of it with upgrades and by quickly removing spam.
Flickr is a great service for storing your photos, as everybody already found out. As the lst person on the internet, I finally got to try their service out today, and just like everybody else I am very impressed.
I have uploaded a bunch of photos and started playing around. thing I like most is the tagging feature, allowing me to link keywords to photos. I like Flickr so much, that I am probably going to replace my existing photo gallery which I maintain in Movable Type by Flickr.
I will maintain the photos with Flickr, which will automagically create entries on my blog. The only thing I am not sure about is how to deal with comments, since both MT as Flickr allow visitors to comment on photos and I don't want my sparse comments split over two sites.
For the coming period I will be uploading and tagging photos, in preparationof the new gallery. You can follow the progress at my Flickr page.
