Downtime Yesterday

For a couple of hours in the morning the server my site is hosted on was down. My host notified me by e-mail and I received notices from three monitoring services around the world. No worries.

I've worked on a new snowflake set but haven't released it yet. It's a little different from the ones I already offer. But I'm not too happy with it, so it needs to be re-worked. Look for it next month.

I don't know about you, but I'm already looking forward to spring. lol

Gloomy winter weather just isn't for me.

Short Downtime

On Thursday the 17th, there was a short downtime of less than one hour. I know that my web host was doing maintenance on a server -- not the one my site is on -- but they may have been testing all servers. Not a big deal.

7000th Visitor!

In just over a month I've recorded my 7000th visitor to the site from 6500 last month.

He or she actually stopped by on the 11th, Veterans Day here in the U.S., in the afternoon. They did not stay long or else they had some software blocking Sitemeter's cookie from tracking their activity. They did view at least one page, the top edge backgrounds.

Like many of my visitors, this person uses a PC with Windows, XP in this case, and surfs with Internet Explorer 6.0 on this occasion.

That's all the details I'm giving out. Thank you, whoever you are, for visiting.

Passwords Required Now

In recent months I've noticed evidence of some of my pages and graphics being loaded from the hard drives of people's computers. While I don't mind people copying the pages of the backgrounds and sets to duplicate the layouts, you really need to remove my stuff such as my Sitemeter coding. I don't know what else you're copying, so I can only assume you're direct-linking to my graphics as well.

For that reason, I've enabled password-protected directories for both the backgrounds and sets. You will now have to enter the username and password I've provided in order to view those pages and graphics.

This is a problem almost all of the graphics designers I know on the 'Net have encountered. It is very discouraging to provide graphics for free and to have people steal bandwidth by hotlinking to them. Many of us do not use free web hosting providers. Even if we did, bandwidth is severely limited and we get into trouble by them shutting down our sites temporarily, even permanently, if we exceed the bandwidth provided to us. If you use free hosts, you know what the situation is like. It isn't that different with paid shared hosting either.

In addition to password-protecting directories, I am blocking IP addresses of visitors suspected of hotlinking. Unfortunately, that means that anyone else using that shared IP address, if it is shared, will also be blocked from my site.

These actions are necessary to protect my interests as outlined in my Terms of Use, section 7. If you have any questions or comments regarding any of the above, please go to my Contact page and fill out the e-mailer form. Thank you for your cooperation and understanding.