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AFdN Updates

Information concerning the website

Server Upgrades

The server upgrade isn’t going as planned. I’m going to give it a break and try again on Saturday. Some things are broken, such as leaving comments and whatnot.

A Day of Travel

I woke up at 4:30 this morning so Peter could drop me off at the Hostel. It turned out he wasn’t in the mood for driving and he let me drive myself in. Funny thing though, I really only had a slight idea of where I was going. First, I ended up going all the way into town before I realized I had gone too far. Then, it took me forever and a day to figure out that I didn’t go far enough once I did make the right turn. We ended up leaving the Hostel at 5:30am MST. We drove all morning and into the afternoon, arriving back at Mines around 3pm. I took a quick shower and threw a bunch of random stuff into my bag to fly out to Seattle. Steve and his fiance picked me up from my dorm and dropped me at the airport. I missed the 5:30 flight, but easily made the 8pm flight, putting me into Seattle just a short while ago. Tomorrow I plan on upgrading the server, so don’t freak if the website doesn’t load a few times.

Well, It’s Done!

Just got off the phone with Dell and the server it’s on its way. I’m actually really excitied about this. Having and running my own web site for the past (pause while counting years on finger) 5 years or so has been one of my favorite things to do and really is my hobby, so I don’t mind throwing this kind of money into it. This pretty much does lock me into hosting my site for the next 5 years (average lifetime of a computer), so I won’t have to upgrade again until I at least get out of college, which is a good thing. This server marks a couple high points for Fergcorp and AFdN. It’s the most expensive thing I’ve ever purchased, it’s one of the newest things I’ve ever purchased in terms of hardware, and it will substantially increase storage and computing power (about 40 fold for storage and about 8 fold for power).

So here are some things to look very forward to in the next 2 weeks and the coming 5 years. First, the email and web server will be recombined to form one server. The name of the server will be blackhawk (I just came up with that name). The new server will run Windows Server 2003. Why? First becuase I know how to use Windows and second because I have a copy that I’ve been wanting to use for some time now. Because I’m using WS2K3, all video files will FINALLY be streaming. I will also be hosting a SharePoint Server for some Office 2K3 integration I’ve been wanting to try. Email may or may not be upgraded, I haven’t decided yet. However, I will be accepting from friends to host web sites for a small fee on my server (remember, this thing costs a bundle). Current users will see no manditory cost imposed on them. Perhaps the coolest thing will be faster access times. 2 80GB SATA RAID 1 drives will be providing content to the latest build of Apache, mySQL, Active Perl, and everything else. I expect to see dynamic creation times drop SIGNIFICANTLY. The “Going Live” is set for March 25th at 12PM PST (not MST). Just like Bungie, I will probably not make this deadline. 18 Days and counting!

Spring Break and Server Plans, Finally!

Spring Break is a mere 12 days away! For the first 4 days, I will be skiing with famed “Stunt Man” Peter Walchenbach up at Jackson Hole in Wyoming. The Outdoor Rec Center offered a really good deal and I took it. So that will be from the 19th to the 22nd of March. Depending on when I get back, I am currently planning on flying out to Seattle on the 22nd or the 23rd, I don’t know yet. As it happens, UW has the same break as we do, so I’m going to hang with Quinn and Ben. Maybe even go to Canada. Then return home on 27th for the remaining month and 11 days of school.

So how do server plans fit into this picture? Well, I was looking at servers for CSMBC and noticed that Dell is running some pretty sweet deals. So I spec’ed one out for my needs and came out with a very very cool deal. For a mere $540, I can get a 2.53GHz Celeron Processor, 512MB DDR2 RAM, and 80GB SATA RAID 1 hard drives (RAID 1 being the mirrored hard drive option). I already have my copy of WS2K3, so I can slap that on and be ready to go. It will aleviate a lot of the stress on the current server and myself. Ergo, if you have benefitted from my site, or if I host your email (cough*quinn*cough*annie*cough) or your website (cough*kelly*cough*trevor*cough), it would be cool if you could chip some money in as I am still a very poor college student with no summer internship yet (cough*microsoft*cough*lockheed martin*cough*boeing*cough*anyone!!*cough).

Comment Spam

There was a spam comment left this morning on my website. I knew this would happen, it was just a matter of time. To solve the problem, I will soon be implementing a CAPTCHA system that will at least help prevent computers from leaving automated spam comments. In the meantime, I will be manually deleting spam comments.

Open Source Version of AFdN

First, I am back from Spokane. Second, I am leaving on Tuesday morning. So if there’s anything critical that someone needs to see me about, you better let me know quickly or wait until I’m back (maybe Spring Break, maybe May-ish, maybe middle or end of summer; who knows).

Now, I had this great idea: convert my website engine into an Open Source project on SourceForge.net. I haven’t had any requests for my source, but I’m going to be changing some things to make the AFdN engine a lot better. For starters, I’ve already changed the code so that it can use Movable Type CSS Stylesheets. I am also going to work on some code so that it can use MT Pluggins as well, hopefully. In short, I hope that I can make it sort of a PHP version of MT, but only for one person and only for one blog, but with other non-blog content.

All Better Now

Every once in a while, I get fed up with my own CMS (content managment system) and seriously consider switching to Movable Type or something like that. I even get so far as to install the software on my server and start to dabble with it. Then I remember why I use my own CMS: I can do so many more things. Yet, I’m still frustrated with my own system. So I think I found a solution. I’m using the layout format and Stylesheets from Movable Type but then populating the page with content from my own CMS. So I did it (and now you’re seeing it). AFdN v 8.3 codename Rainier II. And I’m loving it. Everything is working so much better and the best part is, text properly floats around the pictures in my blog! This means that AFdN works in MSIE and really well in Firefox. Woo Hoo!

Big Updates, Hopefully

Well, I think I’m finally getting around to upgrading the AFdN servers. I bought a couple server boxes last year, however they didn’t have any guts. I’m currently bidding on a set of dual PII 450MHz ATX Motherboards with 512MB RAM in them. It’s really quite a bargin and should work really well in the new setup. I also plan on buying two new hard drives, perhaps 120GB Wester Digitals, for the new setup. The plan will be for each computer to have the exact same setup, but different primary operating modes. Server #1 will be for the primary web server and streaming media server, while Server #2 will be the primary mail server. I may end of changing this so that one computer is the primary for everything and the other computer is just an exact duplicate, but I really don’t know yet.

End of the Year Summary

This will probably be the last post of 2004, so I figured that I would just give out a bunch of stats on where AFdN is and where it’s going. First off, there where at least 5804 unique vistors for 2004. With 12918 visits, that comes out to 2.22 visits per unique visitor. All in all, 97,889 pages were server up (7.57 pages/visit) with 576,346 hits (44.61 hits/visit). That amounts to 22.76 gigabytes of bandwidth (1,847.45 KB/visit). There was also an additional 6.64 GB of bandwidth consumed by traffic generated by robots, worms, or replies with special HTTP status codes. The best month in terms of bandwidth was January with 4.37 GB (due probably to some videos I put up). The worst month was October with a mere 694.95 MB (AFdN was offline for about a week while I as messing with the new static IP address). The top robot was MSNBot. The top worm was part of the Nima family of worms (which didn’t cause any ill effects because I use Apache, a non-Microsoft product). The average visit was 468 seconds. The most requested file type was jpg files with 19.8% of the hit requests and 13.6% of the bandwidth.Microsoft Windows XP was the most used operating system with 57.2% and 62.2% of vistors used Internet Explorer 6.0. Google sent 54.7% of the traffic from search engines. http://seablogs.hellbent.org sent 8% of visitors from external pages. "prom pictures" accounted for 5.8% of all keyphrase searches.

So, thanks for making this year such a great year. I’m sure I’ve added at least a gig of content since the begining of the year (mostly pictures, 2720 just in the gallery). I wish everyone a prosperous New Year. Look for my first ever New Years letter coming to AFdN within the next week or so!