I logged into my Wordpress.com account today and discovered I have another account to give out. Sure, there are ethical issues with actually using it as a blog (specifically the Akismet comment filter) but if nothing else it’s 25Mb of free, unlimited bandwidth image hosting.
[EDIT] Forgot to mention: the point of this post is that you should drop me a line if you want the invite, because I have no particular use for it.
The good news is that the combination of Bad Behaviour and htaccess tweaks has cut the site’s bandwidth usage by nearly two thirds. The point of this? There’s little chance of 509 errors occuring at the end of April, which (based on trends in my webstats) looked likely to happen if I did nothing.
I’ve modified my htaccess file to block known site leeching (aka ‘offline browsing’) programs from the site for bandwidth reasons – there are not very many (if any) legitimate users making use of these programs – they don’t even make it into my AWStats list of top useragents – but the bandwidth usage of these programs can be quite significant. Take every page as 40kb, multiply that by 300+ posts and suddenly you have 12Mb bandwidth per leech. I didn’t even think it was a problem on this site until I saw something called LinkWalker while I was looking at my raw site log. A quick googling confirmed that LinkWalker is a particularly bandwidth-sapping leech program Mod_rewrite to the rescue, problem solved!
I’ve switched to a different Wordpress theme. This one generates pages about 40kb in size, as opposed to the about 55kb pages from the more image-laden K2. That may not sound like much, but it equates to a bandwidth reduction (for actual pageviews at least) of over 20%, not to be sneezed at. It also looks cleaner and places more emphasis on the content of the posts.
For bandwidth reasons (my site’s bandwidth usage has jumped significantly over the past month or two) I’ve reinstated the Bad Behaviour plugin. In a nutshell it uses predefined rules to block spambots, saving bandwidth as a result. There shouldn’t be any ‘false positives’ and in fact (due to the way the filtering is done) if you are able to view this page (on the site, obviously not on the Feedburner feed) then you’re fine. If not, drop me a line.