Category: Administrivia

Hotlinked images…

Wondering why you see this message?
Hotlinks prohibited

It’s because I’ve hit a problem lately with people hotlinking to this site. Most of the cute images you see here on the blog are redistributable things of questionable ownership to begin with, so do feel free to copy them. But when I say “copy” that means do a “Save As” and then upload them to your own blog/livejournal/myspace site, or whatever. DO NOT just copy the direct link and include that in an <img …> tag or similar, or do the same thing via one of the sites that hides the HTML from you.

This blog runs on my DSL line, and when a lot of people are all downloading images, that slows down everything else I do. Normally I don’t have tons of readers, and while hey, it’d be nice if that changed – though it would probably mean I’d have to WRITE more first, it would probably also mean it was time to move it to a real hosting provider who would then charge me for bandwidth overages :(. Either way, losing bandwidth to hotlinks to silly “forward” type images (the “Bible Warning” and the “Pancake Rabbit” in particular) is just a pain I’m not happy with.

We’ll see if that ugly link is sufficient to get people to stop. If not, I’ll just have to block them entirely, and then folks’ll just get the ugly “couldn’t load image” red x.

This is only a test…

Ok, this is just a test to see how well posting works from my little PDA thingee. So far I am not terribly impressed with how this site looks on the mobile screen but logging I and bringing up the post form works OK and the miniature keyboard is not half bad – if a little slow.

Anyone know about optimizing these thing for both desktop and PDA user? Does anyone out there with a Treo or Blackberry want to comment on the way the site appears on your device?

Update looking on the PC – one bad typo “botb” and one extra line break. Not too bad. Can we say “blogging through boring meetings?” anybody?

I am so l33t!!!

There was planned downtime this weekend. The server now has mirrored hard drives, using the software RAID1 driver. And a hopefully much faster news spool on its own partitition, but that is a separate issue most of you are unlikely to see (if you actually know me in person and don’t already have one, do feel free to ask for an account…)

Downtime and administrivia…

Web server was down from 10PM last night to 5PM or so today. Mea cupla, and I’ll try not to let it happen again.

Also, in case regular readers may not have noticed, SFChat.org no longer points directly here, and instead has a brief directory and the note:

If you’ve come looking for Nate’s Blog, the correct address is https://www.cubiclehermit.com/.

Feel free to click on either of these links to go there now. There are some hacks to enable permalinks to continue working, but these (and this message) will be going away. The old “official” address (http://www.sfchat.org/wordpress/) is now being redirected to the correct one, and while this redirection is permanent you are encouraged to update any links or bookmarks.

I’ll maintain the links as long as it’s practical to do so, but please update your bookmarks/favorites. If and when I ever get enough readers that it gets impractical to keep hosting this on a DSL line, I’ll probably have to make some compromises and the links may not remain practical.

Two small notes…

This color scheme (*) is tentative, and I should mention that I’m mildly red-green colorblind. I’ve run it by Marie, and she seems to like it, but if you dislike it or have any suggestions for improvements, please leave a comment or email me.

(* It’s mostly dark green, with a pale green sidebar/menu, if the colors are long gone and this is in the archives.)

As a second note, this address (the main page of http://www.sfchat.org/ ) may or may not be a permanent URL for this site – I’m waiting for cubiclehermit.com to become active, and intend for that to be the long-term address of this site, although in the short run that will just redirect back here until I can get some of the technical details worked out.