Tuesday, May 16, 2006

New posting system finally available

After about 5 months of work... tons of known bugs fixed.... the new posting system is finally up and ready for use!

Of course we do expect some problems as the "real-world" use starts. So we recommend all people writing out what they want on their computer, then pasting it on our site -- that way if it errors, they won't lose anything.

And don't worry, if it errors, we'll post the message for you! (and for no charge*)



* that is assuming the post would be normally free.

Friday, May 05, 2006

Sometimes googlebot drives you nuts.

For the past week, almost every day, googlebot has decided that Everywhere's Local deserves to be indexed.... so... for a timeframe varying from 6 hits per second, to 1 hit every 10 seconds, they've been nailing the website indexing the index page about 15,000-50,000 times each day during a 3 hour period. If they kept it up for every hour in the day, it'd be 200,000 hits a day; fortunetely they don't do that.

Now all the other bots read the robots.txt file, and actually know of and obey the "Crawl-Delay" parameter. Googlebot doesn't. I'd ask for it to be slowed, but from what I've read, they don't slow the bot, they stop the bot. How much simplier it'd be for Googlebot to obey that command -- at least then 3 hours each day wouldn't be spent monitoring web page views to potentially block bot access.

Although, if anyone out there wishes to donate money to us, invest money, or otherwise just use our paid services, we wouldn't have to worry! But for now, we have a limited amount of resources that can be used each day, and the bots are using them all up -- well googlebot is right now.