Category: Site Info

Traffic Update

After last week’s storm of traffic (which is still coming just not as hard), my server’s finally recovered a bit. I know I’ve pushed at least 50 gigs of traffic in the last few days on that video (can’t get good stats on the old server, so I don’t know for sure). I’ve been pushing about 10,000-20,000 page views for the last few days. I had to shut off BlogAds for part of the weekend as it wasn’t responding to the traffic (Google’s Adsense servers were responding just fine). It’s since been reenabled with two ads that came in over the weekend.

Speaking of ads, you might notice the ad up in the upper right for our local cable company. In full disclosure, yes they are paying for that spot, but I do still reserve the right to criticize them if I feel the need (they know they’re not allowed to touch the editorial on this site). Why are they doing it? Because my traffic rank is higher than bend.com and near to the Bulletin’s (many days I’m higher) and they’re no dummies.

December 5, 2005

Welcome Spiegel.de Readers

This site was inaccessible this morning for a bit. Why? Because it was getting killed by traffic from this link (update on 12/14: And this link, too). I don’t speak German, so I have no idea what any of it says, but I do know they managed push 10 gigs of bandwidth and an average of 300 connections per second in the last 24 hours linking to this entry. I’ve since moved the video to another server (thanks a ton to Karin, my partner in crime on this server) so hopefully that will make things function a bit better (and make it so I’m not totally saturating a 10mbs connection).

It’s also totally hosed my e-mail for this domain, so if you’ve tried e-mail any address at utterlyboring.com, it didn’t get through, so go ahead and try to e-mail me at utterlyboring [at] gmail [dot] com.

Update at 12:50: Looks like there are quite a few sites linking to that entry. Welcome to everybody!

Update at 3:40: At last count, in the last 7 hours, we’ve pushed 19.3 GIGs on that video above. Amazing….

December 1, 2005

We’re Back

Well that was a frickin’ mess.

If you haven’t noticed, this site has been inaccessible for the last several hours (about 10 or so). I’ve been racking my brain trying to figure it out, knowing it was a DNS issue on the server (as I could get on via IP, but not domain), but I could NOT for the life of me figure out what it was. I e-mailed my partner-in-crime who is the billing contact on this server, but couldn’t get ahold of her. And since my laptop is still in the shop, I didn’t have a local copy of her phone number (it’s all in Sunriver) or account information so I could contact our host myself. So I e-mailed around, posted on some support forums, and e-mailed our host’s support desk, got a response, and apparently a cPanel upgrade yesterday bulldozed the named.conf file. A few simple commands and we were good to go. Too bad I didn’t find that forum post about 8 hours ago.

So if anybody has any e-mail they’ve been trying to send me, please re-send it as it might not have gotten through.

November 20, 2005

Comments Off, Server Move Coming

Just a heads up to all folks who might likely view this site today (and possibly early tomorrow morning): I’m moving this site to a new server. Now, in theory, that should cause any problems, but you never know what will happen. In the meantime, I’m turning off comments on this site for the next 24 hours to make sure nothing gets lost in the move.

If there are any problems, or you notice something a bit whacky, e-mail me at utterlyboring strudel gmail punt com (huh?).

Update on 10/24 at 9:00AM: Comments turned back on, site move completed. So far, so good, though I’m still running into some oddball MySQL and PHP errors on one site and I haven’t tested to make sure my mailing list still works. But you can now comment, if you so desire.

On a side note, this server is MUCH faster than the old one, and rebuilds go stupidly quick. I’m in the process of rebuilding all my individual archives right now, and it’s just popping through them.

October 23, 2005

7000th Comment Posted

Nothing really exciting about the comment, really, but I did want to point out that is was the 7000th published comment on this site — which means I’ve deleted 5046 other ones at one point or another because they were either spam or duplicates.

And yes, I know I haven’t posted much the last few days. I’ve been a bit under the weather and swamped with projects both at work and at home. I promise I’ll get some stuff posted soon but for those folks e-mailing asking if I’ve died, don’t worry, I haven’t (and like’d I’d be able to e-mail you back if I did).

October 15, 2005

DNS Troubles

I’m having some issues right now with my server that’s hosting this site (and many others). It’s affecting domain resolution on the machine. I’ve posted a support query over here (also copied in the extended entry for this entry in case people don’t want to register) that’s much too geeky for much of this site’s audience. But if you’re getting bounces when using my e-mail form on the left, this is probably causing it.

If I don’t get an answer soon, I’m probably going to have to reboot my server, which I never like to do as a server should never have to be fully rebooted (usually services can be restarted to fix most problems).

Update on 10/7: It actually ended up being a host problem. They changed some things on their routers and/or firewalls that required more declarations in our resolv.conf file. So after lecturing the host about notifying me about those minor little changes, things are up and running again. I’m changing the post time on this post so it goes below my videos post on the front page until I can get up more entries.

(more…)

October 6, 2005

Mailing List Broken

Apparently my nightly mailing list hasn’t allowed new subscribers or unsubscribes for about three weeks (or more) now but was still sending out e-mails on schedule so I assumed it was still working. After some experimentation, it was totally broken. I just didn’t read the release notes properly, so I’ll try to be fixing this as soon as I can.

Update: Fixed the sub/unsub problem, so you can now start using the form on this page again to sign-up (or just go here.

Final Update: Got a new version of my scheduled mailer from the developer, and hopefully things should be fixed again. If anybody has any trouble, let me know.

October 2, 2005

Turning Off My E-mail Form

For anybody who’s trying to e-mail me using the form on the right side of this page and you’re seeing an error, there’s a reason: there is some scummy script/bot/thingy out there that is pounding the form and sending me craploads of data from a variety of IP addresses. It’s obviously an attempt to see if they can use the script for spam (they can’t). Meanwhile, I’ve just renamed the file that the form uses until I can get a better mail script (with possible captcha support) that can ward off stupidity and keep it from getting to me. I’m looking to just implement this into my e-mailing script, but I haven’t quite found the time.

Meanwhile, if anybody wants to send me links or comments or what not, e-mail me at jake [at] orty [dot] com.

September 15, 2005

UtterlyBoring.com Gets New York Times Mention thanks to AOL Idiots

Morons who subscribe to AOL have made this site (sort of) famous. Over two years ago I posted a simple, quick little link about how a guy canceled his AOL account in 3 minutes. Nothing really exciting about the link, really, but for some reason the entry got listed well on Google (as well as this search), so people are coming to the page, thinking that by posting a comment on my site, I can somehow cancel their AOL account (even to the point where some idiots were posting usernames, password, credit card numbers, etc…). In a later entry about cancelling AOL, I’m also getting some odd-ball comments.

So far, I’ve left the comments on the entry open, and while a few commenters have found it hilarious, most of the 150+ comments are from AOLers wanting to cancel their AOL account. I’m almost considering starting a service where I’ll cancel their AOL service for a small fee (So for $50, I’ll just call AOL and deal with ’em for you).

That entry, obviously, has been mentioned on a couple blogs, and now comments from it have shown up in a New York Times article (mirrored on the IHT site).

And to think the only reason I found that article was because I was looking for the source for this forward sent to me by Barney:

As reported last week in the NYTimes:

Guy tried for better part of a week to cancel AOL. He talked to six or seven different people on six different days. Each time he was thwarted by what is apparently an AOL plot that make it next-to-impossible to cancel the service, as the representatives pretend to be concerned about you and your reasons for cancellation and give you soothing chat and reasons to continue AOL service.

Finally, weary of the runaround, he went into a “chat room” and started threatening to kill people in the room.

His AOL account was cancelled in under three minutes.

I’ll be sure to update the original AOL post with a link to this entry, in case somebody there actually reads the entry copy before commenting.

September 13, 2005

Movable Type 3.2 Installed

It was a bit more complicated than I would’ve liked, but it was no fault of Six Apart’s, it’s more my fault for having a bunch off odd-ball plugins and template hacks. That, and I accidently uploaded the files initially in binary format, which caused all sorts of trouble.

But things have been updated. I’ve updated the various plugins I use to their 3.2-specific versions (specifically MT Blogroll and MT Notifier). I also updated the basename of my older entries so that I can start using shorter URLs (it’ll probably hurt my search engine rankings on new posts, but I really don’t care all that much). But it will enable me to change titles to include something like “Updated” on the end of the title without completely bulldozing my link to the page.

I was playing with the beta on a separate site, so I knew what to expect, and I knew it would take a while to get this one fully updated/configured to my liking (with 3000+ entries and over 6500 comments, it takes a bit of time to upgrade everything). Overall, the improvements are nice (and there are a ton of them). Hopefully one of these days I’ll have time to redo my templates so that they actually take advantage of some of the new tags and such, but meanwhile, we’re up and running. Let me know if anybody finds any problems.

August 28, 2005