Ok, after a short downtime, we’re back up and running on a new server. Much more bandwidth allowance on the new one.
In the meantime, another new show came to my attention. It’s called EVE no Jikan, or “The Time of EVE”. It revolves around androids in the future, which most people treat as tools, but some others are attracted to them. At first I thought this is just blatantly ripping off Chobits, and didn’t expect much at all. I couldn’t have been more wrong.
Continue reading ‘Are you enjoying the time of EVE?’
…sort of.
Actually, Jaymz finally got his forums going. So go check it out if you’re a fellow AusAnime refugee. :yarr:
Back in November, I wrote about how a lot of people were hotlinking to the site. And now I have some data to compare with.
Isn’t it funny how a simple URL rewrite turns 3.72Gb of bandwidth into this:
Funny that. I estimated it to be around 20%, but it was actually 65% of usage being wasted to hotlinks. Wow.
And awstats’ HTTP status codes log tells the rest of the story:
I’ve updated Wordpress to the latest version, along with adding a few new tricks to the site to try and stop spammers. Yes, it’s a captcha, but this particular one is reCAPTCHA. It’s basically using the captchas as a human OCR reader.
I’ll update the theme tonight, along with a bit of a post on what’s coming up in the January anime season.
So as it turns out, the anime community is full of freeloaders who think bandwidth grows on trees. Here’s an interesting fact you may not know: it doesn’t. The server is in Australia, where bandwidth is actually rather expensive. The site used 3.72Gb of bandwidth in September, and I can tell you from looking through the Apache stats that a fair chunk of hits were not from actual page views on this site or hotlinked through my own use. I estimate around 20% of the hits this month have been hotlinks not of my own. I know this is very rough, but if you take 20% of 3.72Gb, that’s a whopping 700Mb of bandwidth.
So I’ve decided to put a stop to that before it grows out of control. From today, hotlinking from sites other than what I’ve allowed will not work. You’ll instead get a pleasant picture of a LOLcat with cheese on its face. You may also get this if you’ve got the HTTP referrer header turned off in your browser, and if you do, stop being a paranoid bastard.
On to the second and more obvious change. Because of the sheer amount of data this site uses, I’ve thrown up some small Google ads to offset running costs a little. I don’t expect to actually make any profit from the ads, since they seem to think this site is about pudding. Wonder what gives it that crazy idea.
Since I’m an unoriginal bastard, I’ve blatantly ripped off Jaymz and added Gravatar avatars to the blog. So if you add your avatar to Gravatar, then post a comment with the same e-mail address, you should see your avatar.
If you don’t have a Gravatar account, you’ll see my friend, the Weighted Companion Cube.
RIP Weighted Companion Cube.
