So that McCain/Cotton image? Yeah … linked to all over the frakkin ‘net (hotlinked sometimes, too; bastards).

This was perhaps a bad time to try moving the site from mod_php to mod_fcgid, or, depending on how you look at it, the perfect time. More on that later.

So the first 8K hits came from StumbleUpon, which I forgot existed. Then when that was done the forums picked it up and started hotlinking it all over the place (and I’ve resisted the urge to drop something evil in its place only because I have the bandwidth to take it — go Quantact!).

That was a nice test of my new arrangement for PHP, to say the least. The server started to choke early on and then I discovered that Tracker.module was logging an error to the database on every page hit. Turned off the module and replaced it with the Views equivalent and it came right back up (no more writing to the DB).

Then it appears Reddit picked it up (as a hotlink, of course). Funny thing about getting high up on Reddit: the top 30 or so links are at the bottom of frickin-Wired-dot-com. Yep, Wired. So I’m getting that as well.

I looked at the traffic stats tool on Quantact and saw that I went from near-nothing to 600Kb/s, then 1.1Mb/s, then 2.1Mb/s and it was going up even more. What the hell? I looked at the file … I’d saved it as a PNG. A 500KB PNG.

:wall:

I made a JPEG version and added the proper redirect and updated the blog entry. Now everyone gets the 100K file, my usage has fallen to 300-400Kb/s, and the site is very responsive now (compared to when it was at 2.1Mb/s at least).

If it sounds like I’m complaining, I’m not. I’m just a little shocked. This round is much worse than when Slashfood picked up the Krispy Kreme Luthers a few weeks ago and I’m loving the lesson in how to keep a server going in 384MB of RAM. :)

We’re at 30K hits to the actual page and an additional 25K for the images.

This is fun. :)

I don’t have the time to implement this, but I’d love to see someone make it…

Image Mirror

• Implemented as a filter module.
• Looks for IMG tags in the output (you’d put Textile et al. in the chain before it) and then replaces the URL with a local mirror of the image.
• If there is no local mirror, then on the first load it fetches the image, adds a line to a table (source URL v. local file path), and then places the image in a subdirectory of the site’s files path.

• White- and black- list for domains and subdomains. Check the full domain against the black list, then the white, then remove a part of the domain and repeat all the way to and including the TLD portion.

Benefit? Go to any site on the web and right-click to get the URL of an image you want to use and then just paste in the other site’s image. Then the filter would make it local so you’re never hot-linking to any one else’s site.

That would freaking rock.

I spent a good deal of time getting my various sites upgraded to Drupal 5.2 today. The codepoetry site had been at 4.7 for quite a while because it was using some modules that sucked in their 5.x incarnations but the move to Redmine for support.codepoetry.net removed the need for them and I was able to finally update it to 5.2. Same deal for ungeni.us and another site. The rest were on 5.1, so that wasn’t so bad.

So after all this, and getting the theme tweaked on this site and such, I come home, sit down, check the mail, and …

We have just released Drupal 4.7.8 and 5.3. These are maintenance releases that fix
problems reported using the bug tracking system and a number of security vulnerabilities.

sigh

At least they’re all in one big folder now, I suppose. And further consolation is that I’m sure the modules I use won’t work well until 6.1 is out, so I won’t have to worry about 6 any time soon. :)

So I had a neat idea one day and realized that a lot of the little places on the web provide RSS feeds for all of their content as well as for the content that you create on the site. Sites such as Digg, del.icio.us, and Flickr let you post your content to them and then give you an RSS feed to do with as you please with that content.

Well, I’m a big fan of keeping all of my content together in one place, and creating that content elsewhere on the web was kind of annoying me and making it so that I would rely on that less than I could because there was no easy way to put it all together and make it useful.

That was amazingly easy, once the modules were ported. I had to go get a patch for Scheduler and then update the theme (I wrote it in PHP, not thought a templating system — I do odd things) but after that, it was painless.

So, now for the fun of turning on cool modules. Beauty to come soon.

Well, I have to get MG over to 4.7, so I just took some hours out of my night and just finished porting the Drupal Question module over to 4.7. It was quite painful, really, due not only to the way that form creation changed, but also validation and committal. But, after reading a lot and using the work already done on the bug it was doable, and done. Today, I’ll be doing a lot of work on the server to get MG ported over to 4.7 and live.

This should be fun. There’s a ton of things I can do with 4.7 that will really enhance the site.