Wednesday, July 23, 2003

Someone Shares My Pain A Small Victory is having the same Bryant problem I've been dealing with.  Nice to know I'm not the only site getting rocked by folks looking for pictures or info on Bryant's accuser.  Even though today isn't as bad as yesterday, I'll still go up and over 10,000 unique hits this evening. You may also notice I've taken down the pictures that accompanied the posts on this page.  Smugmug contacted me earlier today and asked what I wanted to do to address the quota problem this has created (5.68 gigs of images downloaded by their calculation).  My short-term solution was to just take down the pictures and hope it all blows over soon.  I've enjoyed using Smugmug and I don't want to have to close my account.  Once everything returns to normal, I'll go back to posting images. One postive:  for those of you with slow connections, this site will load up a hell of a lot faster now. 6:26:37 PM     |

Pounded Over the last few days, this website has been getting pounded by thousands of people looking for pictures of a certain woman who has charged a certain basketball player with a certain crime.  This site has received so many hits that I've now gone over the bandwidth allocated to the pictures you see on these pages.  In fact, I just didn't go over the bandwidth by a little.  I went over it by more than double what I paid for.  All just in a couple of days.  To give you an idea of what I'm talking about, before this past weekend I averaged about 110 unique hits to my website per day.  Then Monday morning comes and I start getting that number every hour.  Monday's total ended up being 1,774 unique visitors -- breaking the old one-day record by 300.  I thought that was amusing at first.  Then Tuesday came. Starting Tuesday morning, I started getting over 1,000 hits an hour -- peaking at 1,823 between the hours of 11am and noon yesterday.  Tuesday ended up topping off at a whopping 19,463 unique visitors in one day.  Counting reloads, this site was viewed over 30,000 times yesterday.  That's more than the previous six months worth of visits combined.  And why all these hits?  Because this site was ranked fairly highly on all the major search engines for combinations of that certain basketball player's name and the words "victim" and "picture." I've also gotten my fair share of emails asking for links to the woman's photos.  Sorry, but I think the fact that some people have posted her photos, phone number and home address disturbing.  Please stop asking me for that information. So now I'll just have to ride this out.  I do have the option of stripping all the pictures off the main page, though my image host might do that for me eventually.  I'll probably just remove a few of the larger images.  As for the hits today:  2,517 as of this posting.  You can check the stats for yourself by clicking on the CQ Counter image in the upper left-hand corner of this page. Back to packing. Related links: CQ Counter for [ random acts of alex ] Userland Site Report:  This site was number one yesterday by a wide margin.  Quickly climbing up the right-hand column, too. 10:30:57 AM     |

© Copyright 2005 Alex L. Mauldin.