Sorry I haven’t been blogging lately, I’ve been a bit busy with apartment hunting. Since I don’t have a job, and Beth does, it fell on me to find a new place for us. We’re moving to Aurora, 30 minutes away, so there’s been a lot of driving involved to see the various places. Almost all of Tuesday was spent driving back and forth, and I went through about 3/4 of a tank of gas.

But I found the perfect place! We sent in our application yesterday, and I’m just waiting for a confirmation. The eviction check turned up positive for me initially; I’ve never been evicted, but my name is too common, so they’re doing a deeper check. Three bedrooms, about 1200 square feet, and it’s nearly 200 dollars cheaper than my current two bedroom. Beth’s commute will drop from 90 minutes each way to about ten, and my (prospective) commute will be about 20 minutes.

Yup, that’s right, I might be employed by the end of the week! Had a great interview for a six month temp to perm job yesterday. Of course, I’ve had about a dozen great interviews so far, so no guarantees. As soon as I know, you will, too.

Update: We got the apartment! I sign the lease the 15th, and we’ll move everything by the 31st. After that we get Beth’s son living with us half the time, and he’s a great kid, so I’m happy as hell. I’ll be even happier when I get a positive call about that job.

Update the second: Just listened to a voicemail from my contracting firm rep, and he says he has positive feedback from the company I interviewed with. I’ll call him tomorrow and make sure, but things seem to be looking up!

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Wow, 2003 really flew by. It was TBOTCOTW’s first full calendar year, and it was a good one. We had just over a million hits and 352,810 pagviews in 181,681 unique visits for a total of 26 gigs (26 gigs! Over a cable modem!) downloaded. December was, by far, the best month of the year, with 281,766 hits and 51,265 pageviews in 28,236 visits (4000 more visits than November) from 15,950 sites with 3.3 gigs downloaded. The worst month was July, with only 6,579 visits from 3,770 sites. Dog days of summer and all that.

I don’t feel like putting the time and effort into a best posts of the year list at the moment, so now I’ll just move on to December’s stats.

Like I said, December was by far the best month ever. Only two stats where that wasn’t true: October had 6000 more pageviews, and February (month of Bubb Rubb, natch) had 1.2 more gigs downloaded.

Traffic for the month was kinda strange, though. Usually (as long as I post every few days) traffic increases as the month goes on, but this month it fell fairly steadily (I just looked back at December 2002, and that traffic pattern was true then, too. I guess everyone ignores blogs with Christmas coming up). Anyway, the best day of the month was the 6th with 1,304 visits from 1,064 sites, and the worst (obviously) was Christmas day with 619 visits from 524 sites (oddly, Boxing Day had 7 less visits, but from a lot more sites).

The top five blog referrers were:
1. caoine (873)
2. Resurrection Song (98)
3. Liquid Courage (79)
4. Ryan’s Rantin’ (77)
5. Vodkapundit (70)

And the top ten search terms:
1. scary pictures (265)
2. tmq (231)
3. blog skins (205)
4. heat meiser (175)
5. tampoline bear (158)
6. bear trampoline (150)
7. jello pudding pops (97)
8. gregg easterbrook (75)
9. barry bonds steroids (72)
10. gregg eaterbrook tmq (66)

The searches for blog skins is strange; I haven’t posted about that in a while, and it’s never been in the top ten before. Also, I love that number four contains a misspelled word.

So that’s that, 2003 and December in numbers. Now I’m gonna watch some football, drink a beer, maybe take a nap.

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Bandwidth theft hasn’t been a big problem here for a while, but at one time whenever I posted a link to a video I could count on numerous links (usually from message boards) directly to the video. People would download the file without ever reading my entry or even realizing that TBOTCOTW existed.

So here’s the fix — you just use Apache’s incomparable mod_rewrite to check the referrer every time someone downloads a gif, jpg, png, or asf file.

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://tbotcotw.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://www.tbotcotw.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/images/stealer\.gif$
RewriteRule \.(gif|jpg|png|asf)$ /images/stealer.gif [NC,L]

If the referrer isn’t related to TBOTCOTW, they get sent this cool little button. Anyone that tries to steal my bandwidth by posting on a message board with one of my images ends up outting themselves as a dirty thief.

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I started writing my post on November’s stats and I realized I never wrote one on October’s. Here goes.

October was one of the best months ever. Not as good as November, mind you, but still heavy on the traffic. TBOTCOTW had a total of 161,401 hits and 57,452 pageviews in 21,780 visits from 9,203 unique sites. That comes out to 5,206 hits, 1,853 pageviews, and 702 visits a day. The best day was the 28th with 1,103 visits from 824 sites, and the worst was the 23rd with 89 visits from 84 sites. That must have been a DNS change day.

The top five non-search engine referrers:

1. Popdex (1,141)
2. Laughing Boy (324)
3. T-Square’s Virtual Insanity (112)
4. Resurrection Song (101)
5. Ryan’s Rantin’ (92)

The top ten search terms:

1. scary pictures (1,342)
2. bear trampoline (426)
3. bear trampoline video (228)
4. scary picture (217)
5. moneyball (184)
6. easterbrook tmq (164)
7. gregg easterbrook tmq (146)
8. tmq easterbrook (143)
9. trampoline bear (136)
10. really scary pictures (133)

Lots of interest in TMQ again in October, no surprise there.

So there was our fond look back at a fine month. Hope you enjoyed it as much as I did.

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We’re closing in on the first full year of posts here at TBOTCOTW, and I was rewarded last month with a huge spike in traffic. By most measures it was the best month ever, and I’ve no idea why. It’s not like a posted a bunch, or even posted anything all that interesting. Traffic was holding steady at about 700 visits a day and then jumped to 1,146 on the 18th and stayed over 800 for the rest of the month. Average visits per day turned out to be 800 exactly.

Totals for the month were 155,480 hits and 37,256 pageviews in 24,025 visits from 11,892 unique sites. That’s by far the most visits we’ve ever seen, and it’s the third most unique sites ever, behind only the two SFB months. The best day was the 19th with 1,361 visits from 815 sites (the 26th had 1,009 visits from 831 sites). The worst day was the 5th with 359 visits from the same number of sites.

The top five non-search engine referrers were:

1. Popdex (1,081)
2. Laughing Boy (101)
3. Walter in Denver (57)
4. The World Wide Rant (52)
5. VodkaPundit (49)

The top ten search terms were:

1. six feet under season 4 (443)
2. tmq easterbrook (320)
3. gregg easterbrook tmq (317)
4. scary pictures (225)
5. tmq (204)
6. bear trampoline (190)
7. trampoline bear (164)
8. barry bonds steroids (108)
9. matrix revolutions (102)
10. six feet under season four (100)

The search terms were a lot different this month. The TMQ/Gregg Easterbrook stuff isn’t surprising, everyone on the net was wondering where he was gonna turn up. But I’m surprised just how many people want to know about the next season of 6FU.

Hopefully December will be even better, I’d love to get 1,000 visits a day.

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If you haven’t noticed, comment submission has been even slower than usual here. I “upgraded” to Jay Seae’s notifier for comment subscriptions, and it seems to be even slower than the original PHP version. So I’ve turned that and Blacklist off, at least until I get the blog rebuilt with my new speed measures implemented.

First, I deleted all the dollar signs from MT tags. Not sure why this speeds things up, or why the tags still work at all, but they do and the speed is much better. Then I commented out the rebuild sections of lib/MT/App/Comments.pm so that it doesn’t rebuild the main index, the category archive, the date archive, and the individual post every time you submit a comment. Instead of rebuilding I wrote some PHP code to get the number of comments straight from the MySQL database. The whole reason it was taking five minutes to submit a comment was that it was rebuilding whole pages, some of them close to a meg long, just to update that one little number.

I had to delete the Recently Commented sidebar item, unfortunately. I’ve yet to figure out a way to get that to load straight from the database. I also had to turn off inline comments on the individual post pages; You’ll simply have to click the comments link at the bottom to read them from now on.

Once I finish rebuilding, comment submission should take only fifteen to twenty seconds. If it’s around a minute with Blacklist and notifier applied then I’ll turn those back on. Otherwise I’ll wait until I get my fast server rebuilt.

Update: Figured out that it was Blacklist doing most of the slowing, so I turned that off and turned the new notifier on. Comments should submit in about 30 seconds under 10 seconds now. Let me know if they don’t.

Update Two: I guess that using the notifier plugin really was an upgrade. Now comment subscriptions cooperate with the blacklist (except that the blacklist slows things down so horribly I’ve turned it off for now), the info is stored in MySQL, and it’s a lot faster. I’ve updated the notifier with all the previous subscriptions since there were only about ten.

I also figured out how to haul enough comment info out of the database to reinstate the Recently Commented feature. I would pull the entire comment text out so I could do inline comments, but I wouldn’t be able to do smilies and the like, so forget it.

Update the Third: Oops, I may have accidentally insulted Jay Allen and his excellent plugin. For the record, let me make it clear the I don’t think that Blacklist is at fault in my comment slowness. It barely added any time to comment submission on my real server, and it’s always done it’s job really well, but since I had to go to the backup linux box everything is just slower.

Hopefully it’s a conflict with another plugin, as Jay theorized. I emailed him a list of my plugins, I’ll let you know if he spots a fix.

Final Update: Ok, got it all figured out. I

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I forgot to mention earlier that I’m now in the sidebar of The Bloghouse at the Denver Post. The Bloghouse is the Post’s group “blog” (or group of “blogs,” I’m not sure which). I’m sorry, but it’s not a blog unless you put multiple entries on a page. Anyway, thanks go to Tiffany Trott for getting me on their esteemed list. I’m guessing she wrote the description:

Matt Moore’s blog covers a lot of ground from pop culture to tech stuff. There’s been a lot of geekiness recently but maybe that’s because he had some technical problems.

Funny that she’d complain about the geek stuff, I think she’s the only one using my PHP and MySQL tips.

On that note, I gotta go update those entries with various bug fixes and enhancements.

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I got a report (from Tiffany Trott) that my skins with the sidebar on the right aren’t displaying correctly in any of her browsers. I’ve checked Firebird, Camino, and Safari, and those all look fine to me but IE6 on the PC does jump the sidebar to the bottom of the content unless you have the window really, really wide.

I thought maybe my CSS was giving the width of the content and links classes in absolute pixels rather than percentages, but nope, I give relative widths, but IE seems to ignore them somehow. I don’t feel like figuring out how to fix it right now, so if you use an affected browser switch to a left sidebar skin. Make sure your refresh once after switching, the PHP includes for the banner don’t work the first time and can make things look silly. Then drop me a line about your problems. At some point I’ll see if I can make it so the site looks good in any browser (well, any browser after the 4.0 versions. Upgrade!) at any resolution.

Don’t you wish that all the browsers followed the standards the same way?

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A comment spammer has managed to push Vig-RX to sixteen on Blogdex. I’m sure this has happened before, but this is the first time I’ve noticed it.

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I don’t know quite what to blame this on, but my traffic is nuts and getting nuttier. TBOTCOTW is getting 596 visits a day with 906 from 670 unique sites on Wednesday. I thought last month that all the traffic was just spillover from SFB: 2003 or the Rocky article but those were a long time ago now. Maybe I’m just jumping on the hot memes at the right time; this ESPN/TMQ post has been read 292 times.

Of course right when traffic is spiking my server crashes and I get all of 72 visits. Great.

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