Sky's Blog

I wrote about this – a few months ago in “Are hungry searchbots eating your site alive?” – but the saga continues! I need a rescue mission, so please will someone send in the SWAT team?

[Geek warning—this post is really for geeks only]

Here’s the short version:

• If you tweet your blog posts, there are hundreds of bots reading the twitter feed and waiting for your post;
• These bots immediately descend on your web server (following a tweet) and spider all over the place;
• If your blog is WordPress-powered or requires significant CPU or database resources to generate a page, this can slow your server at exactly the time when you most need the capacity for human visitors;
• The majority of these swarming bots do not properly identify themselves to your server; and
• The majority of them are coming from AWS now.
• It’s time to firewall unidentified bots hosted at AWS out of our blogs!

(continue reading…)

The San Francisco Oakland Bay Bridge will contain a unique new suspension span when it opens in 2013. Its tower began to rise above the horizon of Yerba Buena Island a few months ago. In this photo you can see three of the existing suspension span towers on the right, and behind the San Francisco skyline toward the left you see a construction crane and scaffolding holding the new tower while it is being pieced together and rising skyward.

A few weeks ago, the catwalks were constructed that will hold the workers while the suspension cables are woven.