I am pleased to announce phase one of the Mount Sutro site upgrade project is complete. In addition to making updates to my original code, some of which has not been changed in some time, the content management system used to power articles, comments, search and feed functions was given an overhaul.

In February 2005, I released the last major version of the site which introduced WordPress as the new CMS. To make everything work just right, I merged the existing site into the WordPress application. It worked very well and was relatively easy to implement, one of the reasons I initially selected the product.

Several weeks later, the next major version of WordPress was released introducing among other things, a new template theme system. A short time later, I attempted to upgrade but the changes I had made when migrating to WordPress were eliminated by the new version. Rather than redo everything, I let it go with the intent of revisiting the issue in the near future.

Nearly three years later, lightning finally struck early in the morning on Saturday, 20 January 2008 and the long overdue project began. Here's a summary of the new and updated features.

• When viewing articles in groups—that is, not individually—links for older and newer articles allow page by page reading in chronological order.
• When viewing articles individually, links for the previous and following article are available along with a new RSS feed for the article's comments.
• The Article Archive window has been reorganized in part to give greater visibility to our feeds, including another new feed that consolidates all article comments.
• When you search for something, the results are highlighted and boldfaced so you can find your keywords more quickly.
• Permanent article URLs are abbreviated to exclude index.php. Do not worry about your existing links; they redirect automatically.

       http://www.mountsutro.org/index.php/2004/04/   ← Old Format
       http://www.mountsutro.org/2004/04/   ← New Format

• New pagination features mean the prohibition on viewing articles by year, month or day is lifted. For example, the sample URL above displays all articles published in April 2004.
• New default typefaces for improved readability include Microsoft's Segoe UI for most site text and Consolas for fixed-width applications.
• With the free Akismet plug-in, comment filtration is greatly improved. After a period of observation, I may elect to relax the current moderation policy and permit instant comment posting.

I still have quite a bit of work to do under the hood for phase two, but I do not anticipate any more plainly visible changes. Please let me know what you think and if you find anything broken.

When I last changed hosting providers nearly four years ago, I made sure that my plan had room to grow. I wanted plenty of monthly data transfer, a decent chunk of hard drive space and various other bells and whistles. My industry friend Marty fixed me up well and thus I shall remain with TLC Web Enterprises indefinitely.

With ample features in hand, the current iteration of Mount Sutro took form and in its own way gained some popularity. Certainly there has always been more traffic from people using web and image search tools versus that from regular readers, but never disproportionately so.

That is, until January of this year rolled around. Between connectivity issues—which, aside from a few recent examples, have been fixed—and my lack of interest in writing for the site, regular updates have been notably infrequent in the time between then and now. I naturally expected to see a drop-off in overall traffic as a result.

When I checked the site logs in early February 2006, I was rather surprised to see January 2006 was the new record holder for data transfer used. Over ten and a half gigabytes of data passed from my server to the world that month.

These figures may seem small in comparison to hard drives you can purchase for $100 today or the amount of transfer seen by mainstream blogs and websites, but for my little operation I have to admit being a bit impressed.

February rolled through and with under eight gigs transferred, I assumed the expected slow down was occurring. While the hiatus continued, traffic did its normal ebb and flow, but kicking between nine and eleven gigabytes of transfer monthly instead of the usual six to nine.

I knew there must be a logical reason for all this so I set out to find it. You do not have be no Sherlock Holmes to figure out this mystery, either. A simple in-depth review of the log files told the story loudly and clearly.

Leeches.

The social cum media-frenzying phenomenon known as MySpace might be getting people's panties in a twist over the charge the networking site, popular with minors, is the unwilling accomplice to child exploitation, pedophilia and pornography. My gripes are a little different, as you might imagine.

First, and these are in no particular order, not since GeoCities has there been so impressive a centralized repository of ugly, unreadable, compliance-hating, auto play multimedia-filled sites. At least GeoCities users have the excuse of time, since the mid-nineties saw the web come into its own. I will take animated GIFs and <BLINK> tags over MySpace sites any day.

Second, as with other social networking sites like Friendster, after some initial amusement I find no real purpose or need for them. I maintain my own website so I can advertise the information I choose to advertise, without the help of any profiles or three page forms. Specific to MySpace, I am not at all interested in the daily ramblings of high school students, nor do I have a desire to meet other people on the basis of which American Idol star I may or may not prefer.

Third, embedded auto play multimedia sucks. Yes, I know I mentioned this item already, but it is so offensive I had to mention it again. It used to be cool to have music play on your pages, I feel mostly because MIDI technology was just getting to the point where commercially-available sound cards could adequately play those nifty rock band songs. Share all the music you want, but at least make me have to press play first. And if you cannot comply with that simple wish, at least stream me something decent.

Fourth, did you know that when MySpace was acquired by News Corporation, the terms of service contract was modified to include a clause (6:1) effectively giving MySpace and hence News unrestricted rights to "use, copy, modify, adapt, translate, publicly perform, publicly display, store, reproduce, transmit and distribute" any and all content posted by users. Without having to pay for it, I might add. All this from a free service actively inviting bands and musicians to set-up a MySpace account and post their otherwise copyright protected lyrics and music.

Fifth, the leeches and yes, the main point.

Search engines have always been friendly to my site, but the multimedia searches can be deadly. As I posted more and the search engines indexed more, incoming traffic for and the leeching of images increased. At first I would check out the offending site and decide if I cared or not. Most often I did not if the site contained nothing objectionable and if it was personal or non-profit.

But the growing popularity of MySpace has served to exacerbate this issue. After recently reviewing my logs, I quickly concluded that although my downloadable assets for Sutro Tower and the MasterCard advert featuring Robert De Niro accounted for a noticeable portion of the increased data transfer, the majority of it was the result of leeching from MySpace.

One by one I identified the graphics most commonly hotlinked and decided on an appropriate bait and switch tactic. Instead of simply renaming the images and leaving "red x" placeholders on the leeches' pages, I knew I wanted to program a redirect so that an alternative image would instead be displayed. Further, I was going to use a public resource I (indirectly) support to host the replacement graphic, therefore achieving two goals: data transfer reduction and leech dissuasion.

Wanting to take the high road while also selecting a replacement image that would not be legally dubious, as my plan would affect countless minor's pages, I narrowed down my choices to one.

I only wish I could have been there as the junior "webmasters" came to their site and found hero Johnny Cash replaced with that. Not to mention the proprietors and users of the forums and other sites I took action against.

Return visits to leech sites have shown most people have now removed the offending hyperlinks, but the Seal still decorates some Spaces. A picture of the Constitution was the runner-up, by the way. The Seal won in the end because of its size and dimensions.

The lesson here, kids, is to not leech images. Upload them to your own space. That is why they call it MySpace, after all. Are you given insufficient space? If so, you should complain! I think the $23.9 billion dollar father News should be able to swing an upgrade.

Due to the recent use of the mtsutro.org domain name in spoofed e-mail headers and the subsequent deluge of "return to sender" reports from mail servers worldwide, any and all electronic mail sent to the mtsutro.org domain will bounce and never be delivered. This change is effective immediately and shall remain in effect until further notice.

See the Contact page for alternatives.

I am again without a stable connection to the internet. I will get to my e-mail as soon as possible, so if you sent me something in the past week or so, bear with me or telephone.

I hope to resume site updates — which have been suspended due to similar outages — just as soon as connectivity is restored.

Antenna art
by Elliot, Home By Six
Saturday, 31 December 2005, 2024

The Sutro Tower has fascinated me for as long as I've been in the Bay Area. I'm sure most people consider it an eyesore, especially longtime residents of SF who may remember Mt. Sutro before the tower. But I'm convinced it's the coolest looking communications tower in the world. (Not that there's much competition.)

So I was interested when I found a website called Mount Sutro.org. It seems to be somebody's blog, but offers quite a bit of information about the tower itself, and even a PDF of the antenna layout. This guy pushes right past fascination into obsession territory. I mean, he even has a custom Sutro license plate. And it's people like that who make the Internet a great place to surf. :-)

Happy New Year to all. Have some Death Cab, some Dan Wilson, and some Jim's Big Ego to celebrate the occasion. But most importantly, have fun!

Likewise, Elliot. I was extremely amused by your post. And I recently became aware of Death Cab for Cutie myself and have enjoyed their music as well.

Since I have been enjoying That '70s Show season three on DVD and discovered the development folder containing the Easter Egg — a hidden message or feature in a movie, book, CD, DVD, or computer program — planned for this site when it was last rebuilt in February 2005, I decided that it was fine time I complete that little project. But instead of continuing work on the Gattaca-themed Easter Egg already in progress, I decided to make a little tribute to That '70s Show.

Let me know what you think if you find it.