The importance of choosing the right font
 

To me it seems this effect was intentional.

You have to admit, it's a catchy sign.


And yeah, if the Cellar would host images (it hosts the attachments anyway, so the storage overhead is the same) we could avoid this attachment nonsense.

I suppose, but I can't think of a faster way to use all my bandwidth than to run a free image hosting service.

I could do the work to figure out how to refuse to serve images unless they're requested by pages here. But I'm tired, and all this reconfiguring to manage security and bandwidth problems that don't exist yet is really frustrating over the long run.

in other words, bugger off!

seriously though...

Hard drives are cheap. Storage overhead is nothing. A measly T1 is ~$2,000 per MONTH. You could buy a terabyte of storage for that price. Every MONTH.

I like the fact that the attachments are shown as they are for two reasons: 1) it means there aren't a ton of images on a page that I don't want to see, and 2) it keeps Tony's bandwidth usage down (because 200 people aren't re-downloading the image every 10 minutes when they reload the thread). The Cellar is free; it's a good discussion board and it's a gift to us from Tony. I think the least we can do is find another place to host all the damn images we throw up in this thread.

Also note that Tony's pipe that he hosts the Cellar on is the same line he uses for internet access - when he gets overloaded, his personal internet access slows to a crawl.

Good points up to the last one. Unlike a lot of connection types, a T1 has the same bandwidth incoming and outgoing and it's all asynchronous. Unlike modems, it doesn't have to stop transmitting in one direction in order to transmit in the other direction. So I can download to my heart's content even if the outgoing bandwidth is all taken up.

And you can bet I do :cool:

when i post images, i just upload the image to my free university webspace and link to it from there.

But, hey, why not create a geocities account and host the image there? It's a lot of work I know, but it's still cool to be able to share images with people. :]

ok, here's a geocities account for us to use.

username: cellardotorg
password: undertoad

Just point your browser to www.geocities.com and log in. There are even web-based admin tools for uploading.

And don't change the password! :)

[http://www.geocities.com/cellardotorg/megaflicks.jpg]


http://www.geocities.com/cellardotorg/megaflicks.jpg

yeah baby. that's right. who's your daddy?

"We're sorry, but this page is currently unavailable for viewing." - Geocities error message

IIRC, Geocities/Yahoo recently modified its access policy so you can't use it to store images and link to them from another site. It checks the referrer, and if it comes from a non-Geocities site, it refuses the connection.

AKA, broken link time.

I think most of the other big 'free webspace' sites such as Xoom, Tripod etc. did the same thing.

Understandable, really: they get 0% revenue from images linked from another site, unlike their banner-based free website hosting. They pay for the bandwidth and storage.

X.

I learned that the hard way about 2 months ago. I need to get my site off Tripod one of these days.

What kind of hosting tools does Tripod give you?

wait a second...now the image is there. I don't get it..... I don't think the refferrer check thing is exactly right..'cause now i DO see the image. Maybe their server was just overloaded or something?

GeoCities checks the referer. Period.

Watch: click the link. It won't work.

Now: click the address bar so it either selects the URL or makes an insertion point. Then press the Enter/Return key on your keyboard. Blammo! It works. Why? Last page GeoCities.

Unfortunately, GeoCities == turds. Not that I don't understand - I do. That's why I haven't put up an ftponly account on my server for you guys to upload images to :)

Tony - My bad. I was under the impression that you, like me, play way too much [Quake III Arena | Unreal Tournament | Et Cetera] online and would notice that. If my bandwidth spikes for a second, I lag for about 5 - drives me nuts. But yeah. I guess if you're just downloading, then you've gots no problem :)

Fun with GeoCities
 

Yeah, I recall when GeoCities used to give you like 2 megs for a homepage. What I would do is then just create as many other accounts as I needed, and link my homepage to images stored there, for a page as huge as I wanted. Later, when I started writing pages on other servers, I would still use GeoCities as my image repository when I really needed them.

That was about 3 years ago, in the "before time", aka pre-dot.bomb era, when it was also easy to spoof your client to the top of a search engine's results using some very simple tricks.

<sigh>

It was all easy money for someone with very little skill, but as with so many things it was only cool when few were doing it. When it became mainstream, and nobody ran an honest search, and GeoCities was hosting millions of parasite images, it became too much to ignore and the web admins did what we most feared all those years: They added a few lines of code that made it all stop.

<sigh again>

Now we've lost something, we've lost that open disk space that made even a poor man look like a bigshot online without even having an account, the tools that let a web designer with hours or days of experience land big money contracts, and even things like Napster, where impoverished folks worldwide could suddenly bask in the glories of a music collection worthy of the richest yuppie.

...hurts too much to remember....

...the way we.....were............

<tears>

OK I'm done. Jesus.

I'm really too lazy to do this next part on my own, but does Geocities allow redirect tags? What about making a GeoCities account that just redirects to the page with the image? Wouldn't you then have a GeoCities page as your last visited page?

When I click on the link, it works. I don't know why it doesn't work for anyone else. But i tested it on Netscape 4.7 on a Sun Workstation at school, Konqueror and Mozilla on Linux at home, and IE 5.5 on Windows at home.

I do have a junkbuster proxy at home, but when I turn it off the link still works. And that doesn't explain why it works at school.

Still..i believe you guys when you say it doesn't work for you. I just don't understand why, though.

What worked for me was right-clicking on the link, then selecting "Open in New Window". That's Mozilla but there is a similar option in IE.

Interesting: once the image is in cache, it comes up as you'd expect in the message!

D, I don't want to preserve bandwidth because I'm playing a lot of UT... I want to preserve it because I have people paying me to operate their sites and maintain their servers and connections, and they are my first responsibility. That's also one reason why I haven't gotten back to your private email on this matter too... that and because I'm not very organized right now. (And I'm also sick today! O happy day)

tony -

check email :)

Oh.. I always use the middle mouse button to click on links. I like having a new window open so the last page doesn't go away. :] It's just a habit I have. It didn't occur to me that that might lead to differnet results. Is the referrer changed to 'NULL' if a link opens a new window?

Only thing is, the link opens a new browser window whenever I LEFT click on the link as well. Does left clicking not open a new window for anyone else?

The forum software is set up so that it generates the Javascript to open a new window for any links that people post.

Juju, I swear I'm not stalking you, but I just pointed out on wilwheaton.net that we're both posting things here too. I posted right after you did there, now I'm posting right after you do here.

*confused...semi-computer illiterate*

Do they just give you a directory to FTP everything into?

Do they have, like, web-based forms to help you administer your site?

Do they give you traffic information, like how many hits for each page and such?

Do they give you easy ways to collect information from forms on your site?

Do they have frontpage extensions which you need?

juju, you have inadvertantly coined the best new word of the century!
 

'differnet': adjective

1) Random and/or unusual behavioral anomalies exhibited among commonly used browsers or websites ('We did the search on Yahoo and Google, but got 'differnet' results' - G. W. Bush).

2) The qualitative discrepancy between an online persona and the actual truth. (Online persona - '5 foot 2, eyes of blue, and just 22'; Actual truth - (5 foot 2) 195 pounds, (eyes of blue) with contact lenses (which she NEVER wears), (just 22) no more than 3 kids, all under the age of 3).

-- NBN

*laughz i love it.

LOL. Yeah..i noticed that you had posted under one of the articles after the first slashdot story.

I've been following that site since the slashdot thing and there are some really intriguing issues that I see with the whole Wil Wheaton phenomenon. It's interesting to me.

I think it's cool how open Wil Wheaton is on the internet, but I think he underestimates his fans. I mean, he has pictures of his house on his website...and pictures of his wife and dog, and kids and parents. I think that some psycho is liable to find out where his house is and start stalking him. Celebrities are protective of their private lives for a reason. Anyway, I'm not putting down being open on the internet -- I just think he underestimates the power of the internet to bring out that 1% of freaks.

But still -- it's really cool. I especially like his radio show.

Heheh .. damn typos!

They have an FTP link. You can sort your stuff into whichever directory you want, I believe. I haven't used the FTP option since I was in college--3 years ago.

Quote:

Do they have, like, web-based forms to help you administer your site?

More or less. The administration is completely web-based.

Quote:

Do they give you traffic information, like how many hits for each page and such?

Not directly. About the only way I could figure out the "true" count on each page is if I add a Tripod counter to each page. They used to malfunction all the time, so I quit using them some time ago.

Quote:

Do they give you easy ways to collect information from forms on your site?

Not sure.

Quote:

Do they have frontpage extensions which you need?

I believe so.

I've had Sycamoreland on Tripod off and on for 4 years now (minus a month on Angelfire and 3 months on GeoCities). But to be honest, I haven't kept up with Tripod much over the past 2 years. Truth be told, I'm still stuck in simple-HTML land. At one point, I had the ads removed from the site (at $6 a month for 6 months), and could do it again. They now offer an easy way to buy your own domain name for use on Tripod. I'm considering going for it. I really would like Sycamoreland to have its own "home" after 4 years.

So do you upload your pages to them via some sort of web interface?

Yep. I create the pages and process them directly through their website.

I wonder
 

Is there any ISP that will sell you *real* hosting, like giving you a block of sockets, the ability to compile and execute your code on their server, keep your repository there, run database software there etc?

I checked with a few ISP's in maybe '97 or 98, that kind of hosting wasn't available. Not that they weren't interested, they just didn't do it.

Have things changed?

Re: I wonder
 

Far as I know, no. You can co-locate your own machines at many ISP sites, but I haven't seen the kind of unlimited hosting on their machines that you are asking for. I can understand why; it'd be an administrative nightmare.

Co-loc yea but its not expensive. Most coloc is hte big end of otwn stuff at exodus etc or you could of course talk to UT =)

You're better off getting a broadband connection and running it off there if you're looking for somehting for a small amout of bandwidth (jsut check ot see whether they allo servers first) Here the two broadband porviders scan for open port80 so everyone runs apache on either 69 or all sorts of random ports.

Actually, there are a few. My company uses a vendor in VA called SoloServer. They have Linux servers (I think they do windows servers as well) that we use. They set the machines up and ensure that the hardware is good and the machines have connectivity. Beyond that, it's up to us. We have root on the machines and can configure the servers and the DB software any way we like. Each machine has a dedicated IP and can be opened as we like to the world.

And you use ssh when you log in as root or su to root, right?

Hehe. That's kinda like "You take your pants off before you poo, right?" :)

Man, anyone that would use telnet to even hit a shell on the machine, much less root, definitely... well, uh, isn't using ssh :)

telnet does have its uses...i just can't remember what.

Re: I wonder
 

Just thought I'd stop being a lurker and chime in on this one... I'm assuming you're talking about essentially a shared hosting account with shell access.

Best deal I've found anywhere is phpwebhosting.com - tons of great stuff, including unlimited space, bandwidth, MySQL databases, for under $10/month. Not sure how accepting they are of running your own server software, but they are pretty forgiving as long as you're not doing something obviously annoying and abusive (like hosting porn, or sucking up CPU with compiles all day...). Decent uptime, reasonable user counts per server. I use it for sites/clients that don't need dedicated or 100% uptime, and has worked out very well for me as well as for a bunch of associates.

No, I don't work for them, get referral fees, or anything like that. Just a happy customer. Since they don't advertise at all, I like to spread the word whenever I can. As always, YMMV, but I'm very happy with them and host a number of accounts there.

thankfully gmail will take care of things for free nowawadays. several megs of frees torage space..