Lazy Saturday spent on the couch trying to catch the iPod repeating a song on random; gray and rainy Sunday with a trip to church in the morning and not much more than a banana and some peanut butter to liven up the afternoon. I didn’t have big plans for the weekend, but it’s not like there was a lack of things I could’ve been doing. There’s so much to do around the house. I could’ve fixed the one sprinkler in the backyard that still doesn’t pop high enough; I could’ve fixed the pocket door in our master bathroom, which has been off its track now for probably a year; could’ve replaced the filter in the air conditioner intake thing; could’ve used the blower to clean the cobwebs off the ceiling of our front porch; maybe pulled the plethora of weeds rooted in my backyard. But no, I did none of those things, instead I sat around surfing the web, holding the baby, and listening to music. I did, however, manage to upload a new series of pictures to Keaton’s gallery, so you should go check those out now.
Speaking of Keaton, I’m happy to say that she’s “officially” sleeping through the nights now. The few long ones she had before were encouraging, but since it wasn’t consistent we weren’t quite ready to say it was real. Now, though, she goes down for between 8 and 9hrs each night – sleeping right through to morning. Now, this isn’t that much of a change for me, being as I wasn’t the one waking every 3hrs to stick my teat in her mouth – but I know Sharaun appreciates it. I keep telling Sharaun that if and when we have another baby, we’re gonna be lucky if he or she is half as good as Keaton is. We’ve had it so “easy” with this little one: she’s not fussy, she’s playful and cute, and she’s sleeping all night before 3mos. Keep it up Keaton, I’m fully expecting a valedictorian cheerleader who shuns sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll. Fingers crossed…
Tech content ahead, readers beware.
After all my surmising and postulating last week about what the cause of my website slowdown was, I think I’m comfortable now saying that I’ve ID’d it and addressed it. Over the weekend I continued to see solid performance from my blog and gallery pages, and my loadtimes on the backend were vastly improved. So what, you may ask, was the issue after all – and what did I do to fix it? I promise this won’t be another long webmaster entry, just bear with me.
The culprit? The Omni Explorer bot. A nasty, dirty, incredibly aggressive bot which was crawling my webapges with such frequency and voracity that it managed to gobble up gigs upon gigs of my bandwidth. I zero’d in on the Omni bot through my usage statistics, noticing it was the number one requester of my site over the past few months. Keying in a simple Google search brought up several folks ranting about the bot, and it’s unquenchable thirst for data. Eventually, I landed on the webpage of the bot’s company, where a goofy-looking apology about its aggressiveness is posted along with instructions on how to block it from indexing a site. In the end, I went with a stricter method of blocking than the Omni Explorer page recommended, as I’d read elsewhere that the thing had been caught ignoring the file they suggest using as a block.
I changed my .htaccess file, uploaded it, and the results were both immediate and amazing. My site sprang to life, responding to requests in a timely manner and looking spry again. And, so far, things have remained that way. So that’s it, the story of how I resurrected my site by denying the raping, ravaging Omni Explorer crawler/bot.
And, before I leave the topic of blogging, I wanted to mention that I added a live spam-comment counter to the sidebar. It shows how many comments the my Akisment spam blocker has currently shot down since it was installed. Check it now, and refresh the page when you’re done reading this entry to get an idea of frequency. Stuff like this is fun for me…
Nerdy stuff over, for those who skipped it.
Before I go, I wanted to pass along a link to what I thought was a great idea: an invitation for folks to list their most “visceral” song moments, right down to the whens and whys of it. I did something similar once, although I think my theme was more “songs that give me chills;” but, it still fits. And what do you know, Teenage Fanclub’s The Concept shows up on both my list and the one linked above. Honestly, it doesn’t surprise me that much – I knew there was something magic about that song the 1st time I heard it… still gives me chills to this day. I actually thought it might be fun to go back and revisit that entry, adding additional information along the lines of what’s on the goodhodgkins.com list (along with the actual song). Maybe sometime this week…
Goodnight, I have nothing more for you.
Also written on this day...
- where ya been? - 2009
- love is blind - 2008
- the mighty and the mighty bored - 2007