Ebert takes down BCmoney!
An early Christmas present or homework for the holidays?
A yay or nay from world-renowned film critic Roger Ebert (of Siskel & Ebert fame) carries alot of clout in the media world (both old and new). Once dubbed “the most powerful pundit in America” by Forbes Magazine in 2007, the full might of this almighty power was felt by our servers as they grinded to a halt on a staggering 200 Gigs of traffic in a little over an hour on December 8th, 2010.
A screenshot of our server stats below shows the extent of the traffic spike (almost 2500 unique visitors in the first hour):
Roger Ebert's backlink kicked our server's a$%
(UPDATE: Fortunately, our generous web hosts at HostOnNet were able to boost our maximum traffic and with a few tweaks, everything was back to normal.)
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Is Google Making It Harder To Run A Successful Business Online?
Google refrigerator (Photo credit: Aray Chen)
Ok, despite similar accusations of monopoly attempts and/or info theft from the likes of Washington Post, NY Times, Reuters, TechCrunch, ZDnet and others; Google-bashing seems like the thing to do. I’m certainly guilty of writing yet another sensationalist and wildly accusing title pitting Google’s ever-encroaching yet seemingly undefined business model, against their supposedly well-defined “don’t be evil” motto.
Seriously though, we’re feeling this one at BCmoney all the way to the bank. Take a look at some of our latest monthly traffic logs from Google’s Index web crawler:
The growth in the size and frequency of visits by the Googlebot spider is starting to possibly interfere with regular traffic, and certainly seems excessive, when technically speaking they shouldn’t have to go much further than visiting the first few kb of any page on the BCmoney site, which has a page-rank of 4.
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JS Transformer
- Image via Wikipedia
The official release of one of the most useful (yet hackish, and randomly pieced together from the interweb) code snippets I’ve ever made. I’m calling this useful little piece of code “JS Transformer”, since Transformers are cool again thanks to Shia LaBeouf.
NOTE:
KEEP IN MIND THE SAME-ORIGIN POLICY OF MOST BROWSERS… you’ll probably have to use a server-side proxy to make this more useful (i.e. proxy.php, proxy.jsp, proxy.asp, etc… a topic I’ve covered before)
BC$ = Behavior, Content, Money
The goal of the BC$ project is to raise awareness and make changes with respect to the three pillars of information freedom - Behavior (pursuit of interests and passions), Content (sharing/exchanging ideas in various formats), Money (fairness and accessibility) - bringing to light the fact that:
1. We regularly hand over our browser histories, search histories and daily online activities to companies that want our money, or, to benefit from our use of their services with lucrative ad deals or sales of personal information.
2. We create and/or consume interesting content on their services, but we aren't adequately rewarded for our creative efforts or loyalty.
3. We pay money to be connected online (and possibly also over mobile), yet we lose both time and money by allowing companies to market to us with unsolicited advertisements, irrelevant product offers and unfairly structured service pricing plans.