Just out of curiosity, I checked my webserver logs. I’ve been meaning to update my logs (and use google analytics) when I switch hosting providers, but in the meantime I check my stats once every six months.
My domain has about 2000 unique visitors a month (that includes pages other than my weblog). My main weblog URL comprises about 60% of the traffic (which makes sense, although I thought it might be higher). I have other random pages still online, nothing much, but here’s where the rest of the bandwidth goes.
One 20% goes to a weblog I maintain for a volunteer organization. It’s one of those thankless duties you should never get sucked into. The people are always complaining, and then always demanding that you fix things in a prompt fashion. More importantly, the people refuse to learn how to post on a weblog (hey, it’s a weblog! it’s supposed to be easy to post!), so they forward announcements to me, expecting me to post there. Sounds easy enough, except it always is a pain to do. Then they don’t use or promote the site, but apparently the spambots do. A few months ago I changed from a regular URL to a custom domain, and ended up replicating the DB. Now I can’t remember which DB is which. I need to delete one or the two databases, but which?
My solution? Do nothing and wait a few weeks until I do the migration. (BTW, the migration will let me deploy the lit community site I’ve been talking about. It will be on www.imaginaryplanet.org, and I expect to have an empty CMS up there in a week or so.
Then, it turns out my other bandwidth suck (averaging about 6%) are random images which myspace members are linking to without downloading a local file. (I read a digg post which I’ll NOT link to about someone who wrote a script to feed the the obscene GOATSE image to people who stole his bandwidth through pictures. That’s clever, but draconian. I don’t hate these guys; I’ve done this myself once or twice. So basically I’m going to do nothing until I migrate.
In the meantime, for the benefit of bloggers who actually care about ME ME ME, here’s the link to the donut picture everyone loves. 
. And by the way, I thought the article I wrote accompanying it was great). Here’s the last line:
If you are at a meeting with 5 people or less and you are completely lost, ask a lot of questions. If you are at a meeting with 10 people or more and are completely lost, say nothing throughout the meeting and try to take good notes. Then later on, take a colleague aside and ask him/her to explain what the hell everyone was talking about.
Leave a Reply