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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.
July Archived
1 August 2025
We've just archived Volume 14, Number 7 of Photo Corners on the Archive page with 14 Features, 5 commented News stories, 26 Editor's Notes (which included 141 items of interest), 1 review and 3 site notes for a total of 49 stories.
That includes 86 images in 15 stories, two stories with gear specification tables and one holiday.
READERSHIP numbers were again skewed by rather ferocious attacks from a number of sites. We were constantly adding the heaviest hitters to our htaccess file to deny them access But we didn't push back the tide.
Some days would see our bandwidth breach the 50-GB mark. Three days of that and we'd be shut down for the month.
We're able to stay live solely because of the generosity of Sonic. net.
Some days would see our bandwidth breach the 50-GB mark. Three days of that and we'd be shut down for the month.
We added more aggressive code to our htaccess file to block that but, unknown to us, the version of apache used by Sonic is not current. Not knowing how to process the commands in our htaccess, it blocked the site for several days from everyone (including us).
Still, at 341-GB we exceeded our bandwidth allocation by 191-GB. That's just ridiculous. These are bots, not readers.
We rewrote our sitemap to use an index to the main areas of the site that are updated daily and hoped that would minimize access. Reading a sitemap, a legitimate indexing bot can find out which files have been updated that day and only access those.
In our case, a daily update might include four sitemaps, four or five Photo Corners pages and three other miscellaneous files on the site. A dozen or so, rather than the 10,000 the bots were accessing daily.
So the 177 thousand typical visits we get in a month were 322 thousand in July. The 115 thousand pages served were over four million. The 1.3 million hits were 4.2 million.
ON THE THEORY the bots cancel themselves out, we can rank our most-read stories. The top nine were Around The Horn columns with tenth place taken by our matinee Surrounded by Sea.
More Horns populated the second 10 with our June archive story in 13th place followed by our Summer Reading piece. In 19th was our slide show of Point Bonita followed by our site update on the return of the bots.
AS WE WORK on this problem with Sonic, make a note of our email address (click on our name in the black bar at the bottom of any page). If you can't reach the site, which may for a couple of minutes be offline, email us and we'll try to unblock your service provider.
Thanks for your patience.