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A S C R A P B O O K O F S O L U T I O N S F O R T H E P H O T O G R A P H E R
Enhancing the enjoyment of taking pictures with news that matters, features that entertain and images that delight. Published frequently.
September Archived
1 October 2019
We've just archived Volume 8 Number 9 of Photo Corners on the Archive page with 17 Features, 29 commented News stories, 24 Editor's Notes (which included 179 items of interest), two reviews and two site notes for a total of 74 stories.
We pulled in the reins the last week of the month when we learned we were in danger of overrunning our allotted bandwidth. But we were able to stave off bandwidth protection (which would have shut down the site) by blocking all site indexing for the last four days of the month.
Two new index bots went wild on two days in the middle of the month so we blocked them for the last week of the month. We subsequently set up a cron job to email us a report on each day's bandwidth usage. That will make it easy to tell if our average daily bandwidth has been substantially exceeded. We'll consequently be able to block offenders more promptly.
The first report this morning showed everything was fine.
We've set up a cron job to email us a report on each day's bandwidth usage.
We also made a few changes to the site to decrease bandwidth. Our main page carousel, which used to present thumbnails to our major stories going back to 2012, now just shows thumbnails for the current page, like our past headline pages. So it's no longer a "best of" index but we can always create a page like the slide show index to highlight our best work.
We also trimmed down the feeds a week earlier than usual, eliminating the prior month's data. Not a big deal, but every bit counted last month.
One puzzle is why our article counter (which shows the breakdown for any particular month) has such high hit numbers (it's in the four figures). To analyze that, we added a log like that we use for our search engine.
So we didn't prop our feet up and coast to the end of the month. But we didn't publish as much in the final week as we had planned, holding some reviews until the new month reset the bandwidth counter.
Still, compared to a year ago, we weren't delivering much less information. We had two non-book bag reviews this September and last September. And one more feature this year (one less matinee, two more obits). News stories this year were down by six and Editor's Notes down by one, although we published 26 more items this month. Total images declined by 46 despite the same number of slide shows (fewer news stories would have something to do with that). But we had 11 more stories with gear specs this month.
Can't keep a good man down, apparently.
OUR LEAD STORIES were an early Horn by quite a large margin for some unknown reason, followed by our coverage of the Phase One Unveils XT Travel Camera System, the Borix FX acquisition of Digital Film Tools, the Leica Barnack Award and the obit for Peter Lindberg.
The rest of the pack followed very closely, however. With our Winery slide show, Audrey Sands appointment and the Brian Day matinee right behind.
APART FROM THE BANDWIDTH ISSUE, we did record the same high level of numbers for unique visitors as we have all year with almost a million pages served (950K). Our visitors tend to average nearly six visits to the site each day as we publish throughout a 15-hour schedule.
So, after a week of holding things in, we were thrilled to report for duty this morning.