Comments on: Scot’s Newsletter List Comes Together

By: Scot

Scot — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 12:06:47 +0000

Simon, my apologies. The I steal bandwidth thing was an exercise that I quickly decided wasn’t going to work. I disabled it after only a few days. However, I’m currently still blocking the display of images by serving them from my sites to other sites. (But the result now is a broken image.) I’d forgotten about the promo page, though. I think I would have to set up an exclusion and put the promo art in a different directory, which would break all the current promotion links. But as it is, they’re all broken everywhere.

There is a very good reason for doing this, though — esp. for people on a shared webhost who are meeting their bandwidth limits. If hundreds or thousands of links to images from my site are placed on other busy sites, the number of calls to my server could quickly chew through my bandwidth allotment. It’s a rising problem for small websites.

It’s obviously more complex, though, than I gave consideration to when I tried out this code that blocks “hot linking.”

– Scot

By: skiwi

skiwi — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 21:12:52 +0000

Scott

I promote your newsletter on my website
(based on the code from your page http://scotsnewsletter.com/promo.htm).
Imagine my impleasent surprise when the code that you provided places an image on my website saying “I steal bandwidth’
(See http://kiwiwiki.co.nz/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Test/ScotsNewsletter)

regards

Simon

By: Scot

Scot — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 12:53:59 +0000

That’s true. The combination of my recuperation from surgery, promotion to editor-in-chief of Computerworld, and the advent of the holidays has left me with less time than usual to write over the last four or five weeks.

I’ve also put quite a few of my meager free hours into improvements to the blog and the newsletter:

• Merged newsletter lists and completely re-crafted, re-coded newsletter subscription tools. Benefits: Much easier to use subscription tools, reduced costs for me, reduced time to send newsletter.

• Research into, experimentation, and implementing both expanded bandwidth for database calls on the server and caching the blog site to hopefully eliminate problems with the blog server bogging down during the first few hours after the newsletter mails. That has been a problem each time we’ve mailed the newsletter since the blog site launched. Benefits: Faster blog-site performance during peak demand times.

• It may not be obvious, but I’ve added about 50 tweaks to the design of the blog site to improve visibility and usability. I haven’t tackled the all-important navigation issue (yet), but several aspects work better than they did before. Benefit: Overall better experience and easier to read and understand blog pages.

Finally, I’m working in the background on trying to wrap up the software firewalls series, so I can give my recommendation and push onto the next series (whatever it may be). That has involved a lot of research. But I am getting closer.

I’m only going to send the newsletter when I’ve written enough new articles to make it worth everyone’s while. I only have one substantive article since the last newsletter, so it’s not time yet.

My best estimate for the next newsletter is the end of Jan. / early Feb. As a result, I will have skipped an “issue” — something I do most years around the holidays.

– Scot

By: RabidWolf

RabidWolf — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 03:24:15 +0000

Is this OK , that is. Stupid keyboard…

By: RabidWolf

RabidWolf — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 03:22:49 +0000

I haven’t seen an email since 12/6/2007. Is this for your newsletter, er sorry, blog?

Thanks,
Bob Martell
aka RabidWolf

By: LabCzar

LabCzar — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 02:14:05 +0000

You might want to “watch” your NOD32 replies for issues with the iPhone. (I had an iPod that worked fine with NOD32, version 2.7x) But when I got the iPhone serious sync issues developed. I finally tracked it down to the IMON (Internet Monitoring) module. NOD told me that module would be replaced in version 3.x — since 2.7 is working and not broke, I have been waiting and watching.

Gordon (G41Potter@gmail.com)
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