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The first week of March I tore apart festival structures. The following week I tore apart this website. It is now history, and I am working on replacements. There are currently four new websites: Something I Said, which is meant for serious public discourse; Rag! which is meant for rants and trivia; Bag, which is about me, and the annex, which is snippets of stuff that may get used elsewhere.
The demise of Explorations in Representational Space went as follows: I'd been having server/access problems for a couple of weeks in February, and the people at my webhost (Siteground) initially said it was due to an overload of trackback spam in my Drupal database. I hadn't checked it in some time and found over a million entries in the trackback table, totalling 600Mb and stalling my server. So I flushed the table and disabled trackbacks. But I was still getting loads of trackback attempts, which were showing up in the watchdog (log) table at the rate of hundreds a minute. The graph above shows that the traffic to this website rose sharply in Feb, and was looking to do the same in March. Something was hammering my site, and I hadn't figured out what to do about it. But I also had an old problem in that the Drupal installation had been copied over from a previous host, and some of the old settings were still pointing there, making certain links malfunction. So I decided to backup the database, delete the installation and put in version 6.1.
That didn't have the necessary effect: the Drupal watchdog table continued to fill up rapidly, and the ISP has restricted access to this domain due to the demands on its servers. Here's part of what they said:
your blog is heavily accessed, most likely by some bots, which intend to post spam messages in your blog. The large number of these attempts consumes a large portion of the server's resources and causes performance issues, which in turn disrupt the quality of the service for all the customers on that server. Last but not least, since this is the second violation of our Terms of Use in regards to consumption of server's resources, in order the limitations from your account to be lifted in full, you will have to pay a re-activation fee of $50.Your website CPU usage is not suitable for a shared hosting server and that is why we will no longer be able to host it on a shared hosting server. We recommend that you consider and upgrade to a VPS of a Dedicated Server, as each of these solutions will provide you with a greater flexibility in terms of software tuning and exclusivity of resource usage. We would be able to keep your account with the limitation active on its current location for the next 7 days. After this period we will have to suspend your account if it is not upgraded.
Ugh. The watchdog problem was going to take days to figure out, and I have no access to Drupal experts. So I deleted the installation. The website is history, after running for less than a year, mainly because I couldn't figure out how deal with a sustained effort by spambots to create trackback entries. In addition to losing the website, the domain was also in question for a couple of days, but I worked something out with my webhost, partly on the basis that I had wiped out the Drupal installation. They deserve at least a couple of stars for having given me a break. It's probably safe to say that Siteground Rocks, as distinct from the other word ending in cks which is a generic term for online complaints. I will leave my thoughts about the Drupal watchdog table out of the discussion.
The domain site will stay up for the time being, but I'll be running Wordpess blogs in a different directory, in parallel with the existing Something I Said. I plan to retire EiRS as a title and come up with something new. The idea is to develop a three-track structure as set out above. There's also an interim blog based on Nucleus CMS in a directory called journal.
So, no more feeds from this particular address. No more trackbacks, and a bunch of busted links. At least there's stuff on the Wayback Machine up to August 2007.
Watch the space next door if you're interested in picking up when I develop a replacement.