Monday, October 31, 2016

Why oh why?

After I moved my web site to a new host, one of the things I set up was for one email address to be a catch all.

Once that was set, I found that someone has been using the domain when setting up facebook accounts. Lots and lots of facebook accounts with a female first names.

I'm not sure what the point is. As far as I can tell, the accounts can't be used, you need to confirm the email address with facebook before the account can be used.

So, the domain will now bounce any such messages back to facebook. They aren't valid and they aren't useful.

Thursday, October 27, 2016

No web site today

So, my host had the ultimate nightmare scenario happen. A script to update a service ran overnight and deleted some key files. Now some of their shared services are down and my site is one of the victims.

Of course, everybody knows that you should be careful about running updates. But things slip through and the company will be much more cautious about automatic scripts running over night.

In the meantime, I have a dead site. Not that pibweb.com was being terribly active of late but this is not going to improve things at all.

Sunday, October 23, 2016

My Mac is back

My poor Mac stopped working a week ago. Given that the Mac is my primary writing computer, this is a worry just before NaNoWriMo.

The local repair shop found that the hard drive had died. So they replaced the drive and installed the base IOS.

Fortunately, I was using Time Machine to back up the Mac. So it's nearly back to normal.

Without the Mac, NaNo would be much harder. This is not an excuse now.

Wednesday, October 19, 2016

Download the magazine

The Rebirth issue of ArtGaze magazine is now available via GumRoad.

It is worth noting that I know 2 of the other 3 authors with short stories in this issue. Also that they have set this issue to pay as you like. So you can download it for free, or throw in a few dollars to keep the magazine going.

The last story in the issue is mine - The Gladiator. If you haven't gotten around to reading it before, now might be a good time.

Tuesday, October 11, 2016

ArtGaze publishes two of my stories

It is a local art magazine. One of the stories is due out in the next few days as part of the rebirth issue.

The other story is out now on the ArtGaze blog.

Nice to see that a story is appreciated and published somewhere outside of my web site pibweb.com/story/

Now, for my next trick, getting someone to buy a story.

Sunday, October 02, 2016

How to annoy a web site owner

It was very simple. Someone embedded an 100 k image from on old game on a forum post.

Because it was embedded, the image was being served from my site.  In two days, it had about 4,000 to 5,000 downloads. While my site does have the bandwidth to serve it for a while, I'm not inclined to be nice when there are no visitors from the forum to my site. I can see that all the hits were just the image - absolutely no one visited my site from that. Not even the review the image is linked to.

So the image has been renamed. When things settle back down, I'll change the name back.

The trick is definitely that I just don't want to find my site runs out of bandwidth for a month because someone embeds a game image. I would not care if they made a copy of it. It's an old game, it's an old review and there's nothing particularly tricky about the screenshot.