I'm trying to experiment with the site formatting, so strange things are likely to occur for the next little while.

UPDATE: OK, finished. I just discovered that I had a typo in my CSS file.

Anyway, the change I just made was to make the active part of the page 30 pixels wider, which means that 800*600 pictures now display fully and don't bleed off the right side when you open individual posts. (They'll still be truncated on the main page. I'd have to add another 255 pixels to fix it there.)

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Site Stuff at 09:41 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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This was curious. It turned out to be caused by ClustrMaps, so I've removed that from the main page.

Is SiteMap still evil?

UPDATE: It seems to have happened to me because our DNS went out. Strangely, I could ping the DNS with 100% return rate, but lookups all failed. I was able to load chizumatic because I had the DNS lookup cached, I think, but looking up ClustrMaps failed, and that resulted in this strange IE error. (Firefox didn't pop up; it just was stuck waiting for a response that never came.)

It took Comcast about an hour to get the DNS working again.

(Please note that this is not a request for advice or suggestions.)

So I went out for a walk. The creek is higher again, and I went down and looked at the dam. The beavers have completely blocked the main channel and raised the spillway there so that it is now dry. As a result the water is now running around it, over the sidewalk, and the water behind the dam is maybe 6 inches higher, which means it's flooding a larger area again.

UPDATE: Late last night I received the following from someone working at ClustrMaps:

(please copy/paste to your site if you want)

Hi-- it wasn't us... really! The DNS failure would have caused the same problem with any other resource needed externally, and you just happened to be pulling in ours.  Our reliability rate is fantastic these days, and I'm wondering if you could kindly edit or 'strike through' the sentence 'caused by ClustrMaps', since, even with your update paragraph, a search engine trawl just now highlighted 'stack overflow caused by ClustrMaps', which is very off-putting to any prospective users!

In case it helps, I've also updated your account to ClustrMaps+ (better zoomed-in continent maps, no ads); you don't need to change the HTML or thumbnail map, which would stay the same).

Many thanks for your consideration!!

It's a bit scary that they noticed so rapidly, and that they thought I was important enough to respond to! Yikes!

This is just an itty bitty anime blog, and it doesn't even get to borrow all the Google cred I built up with USS Clueless, since it's on a different server, at an entirely different URL. (I don't even know how to check that, by the way.)

Regardless, I had already been thinking about removing ClustrMaps from the page, and I don't think I'm going to put it back. But I did want to give them their chance to respond. It would seem that the stack overflow is how IE responds to certain cases of DNS timeout, and it isn't specifically related to ClustrMaps.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Site Stuff at 12:00 PM | Comments (6) | Add Comment
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Google search bait the first: nosferatu__111

The idea is to see how long it takes Google to notice, and to see if it finds and indexes both search baits. My prediction is that it won't see the second one, which is below the fold.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Site Stuff at 04:53 PM | Comments (12) | Add Comment
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The googlebot is hammering me again today. It's looking for stuff like this:

/Chizumatic/cref.shtml/Chizumatic/translation/translation/tmw/else/tmw/reviews/Shingu.shtml
/Chizumatic/cref.shtml/else/tmw/translation/translation/else/reviews/NinjaNonsense.shtml
/Chizumatic/cref.shtml/translation/nitpicks/reviews/tmw/else/tmw/ALDVD06.shtml
/Chizumatic/cref.shtml/Chizumatic/translation/nitpicks/else/translation/nitpicks/reviews/UFOPrincessValkyrie.shtml

None of those is a real path here; but the way my server was set up before they'd all return the "cref.shtml" entry (the second item in the path) and it's loaded with sub-paths. (It's the index of all my reviews.)

Last time this happened I had to block the googlebot in my firewall for a while. Then one of my readers showed me how to set it up so that my server would return a 503 for all those paths.

What I'm hoping is this: that all those idiotic paths are ones the googlebot has in its history and it thinks it is supposed to visit again, and that when it does this time and gets a 503, that it'll tag the path as a bad one and never try to visit it again. hope hope hope

hope hope hope because it's been visiting bogus paths in that non-existent directory tree for the last four hours and it doesn't show any sign of stopping any time soon. I sure hope it doesn't treat the 503 as a temporary thing, and revisit all of them again and again over the upcoming weeks in hopes of finding out if the 503 has been cleared... (Maybe I should have set it up to return a 504, eh?)

It's getting kind of lonely around this part of the blogosphere these days. Shamus has carpal tunnel and may have to curtail his blogging. Wonderduck has medical problems in his family. Ubu has gotten infected with politics. And I'm not feeling so good, myself.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Site Stuff at 06:13 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Man, the things people put onto the internet. (via)

"wonderduck is officially gayer than chizumatic!"

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Site Stuff at 12:58 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
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I reenabled the googlebot, and now it's trying to traverse that non-existent file tree again.

I want to add a rule to my .htaccess file. This is what I think it should say:

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} /Chizumatic/cref.shtml/.*$ [NC]
RewriteRule \.shtml$ /common/404.html [R,L]

Except that "REQUEST_FILENAME" isn't the right keyword to use in the first line. What I want is the request filepath, instead. Is "REQUEST_FILEPATH" the right keyword, or is it something else?

The Apache documentation for HTACCESS is a travesty, by the way. Just thought I'd mention that.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Site Stuff at 10:35 PM | Comments (11) | Add Comment
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Look at this crap:

(In order to deuglify the front page, I'm putting this below the fold.)

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Site Stuff at 04:51 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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Sorry for not posting much. My project right now is to try to do another update to the top rotation. So far I've got:

95 Kirameki Project
54 This Ugly Yet Beautiful World
71 Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya
53 Early Reins
12 Green Green
34 Kiddy Grade
16 MoonPhase

I'm probably going to get a few from The Third and I may take a look at Ikki Tousen.

So I may end up with about 400 new ones. The current rotation is 753, so that would be a bit more than half. So what goes, to make room? I've already started a bit of trimming, but I've only gotten rid of about 90 images so far. Mostly that consisted of pictures from Seven of Seven which I find I didn't like seeing. But I'm going to have to get ruthless if I'm going to eliminate half the current list. Probably I'll get rid of most of the Gravion images that remain, and Yumeria can go. But there are a lot of things I don't want to lose (Shinobu, Rushuna) so it'll be painful. I'll probably seriously cut back on High School Girls and Magical Play and UFO Princess Valkyrie and I'll probably also have to trim a lot of Magikano. And some Ramen Fighter Miki.

Ah, hell; I have to delete a lot of everything. Maybe it would be easier to identify the pictures I want to keep, instead of the ones I want to eliminate. I'll think about that.

UPDATE: Deciding what to keep, instead of what to get rid of, worked a hell of a lot better. I've got it down to 305.

You know, it really shouldn't make any difference, but psychologically it isn't the same. Probably it's because there are pictures I do like, pictures I don't like, and pictures I don't really care about. If I do it as weeding-out, I only get rid of the ones I don't like. But if I do it this way, effectively I also get rid of the ones I'm neutral regarding.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Site Stuff at 11:20 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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Good Heavens! I'm being Slashdotted! (Of course, it's from a comment, and in a somewhat obscure sub-board, so my poor old server isn't being horribly hammered. But it's still strange to see.)

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Site Stuff at 06:51 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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My most recent post managed to seriously anger one of my regular readers. That isn't really what I want from this blog, so I've deleted it.

UPDATE: Pixy: bug? I didn't delete that post, I changed its status to "hide". It's gone now on the front page and links to it fail now, all of which is correct behavior.

But comments on that thread still appear in the right column on the front page.

UPDATE: Just to make clear: I deleted it because it made someone angry, and I don't want to make people angry. I apologize for crossing that line.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Site Stuff at 05:04 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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