Links and Minifeatures 2008 01 12 Saturday

Separated-at-birth twins get married

Nope, wasn't talking about the Clintons. These folks weren't even from Arkansas!

Private Papers has a review - from a historian's viewpoint - of Jonah Goldberg's new book.

The. Truth. Hurts. (in ways that lies cannot)

Why Comments here require login:

I had sent email to my hosting service asking why pages were loading so slowly (the main control panel and email pages were the worst - my browser was timing out half the time - but it impacted basically every page on the site)

Here is the response I got:

There are repeated passby attempts of spammers to hammer away at your comments script. A look at the overall resource usage on the server indicates that your site is actually the highest in terms of usage. We do, however, want to move the site to a beefier server of a higher specification than DELETED (and brand new, since we just set it up last week) to see if that will take away some of the load created when the spammers make their runs through the sites.

By the time you're reading this, the change should have been made, completely transparent to the readers. I may have to modify a bookmark or two.

Between the two sites, I've been averaging 2000 to 2500 actual human visitors per day and less than 30,000 total page views even counting all the bots and search engines. It's all text, so I'm not even averaging a Gig per day bandwidth. But spamster scum and their bots evidently really want to put links to all the usual spam here. This site is not THAT big. Okay, it's not as far out "the long tail" as some, but still, even if they were to succeed, I'd rip it down next time I looked at comments (every day, usually more than once. How about a few more folks speak up?)

(I told them what my bandwidth usage was when I signed up with them, and I have yet to equal the bandwidth I used in July with the previous hosting service).

FYI: the Guidelines for Consumer Focused Carnival of Real Estate have been amended, adding the following:

"UPDATE: (January 11th, 2008): I am so tired of getting the same crud time and time again that effective with the submissions for the Carnival for January 30, 2008 (everything submitted after January 13th, 2008), I'm going to be starting a section entitled "Spam and Other Ridiculous Submissions" There may or may not be links, depending upon whether the host believes the public shame will offset the search engine value of a link in a given case. I'm just tired of getting the same things that are solicitations for business based upon ideas that are incorrect, poorly researched, and often, just plain wrong. I'm not intending to use it for anyone that I believe might have been made in good faith with attention paid to these guidelines, but the submissions I've been getting just cry out for some kind of answer. You're willingly submitting this garbage, or having your agent do so. Deal with it."