Elliott C. Back: Internet & Technology

I’ve been having some trouble with PSA ads running on the Yahoo network. It turns out that my advertising blocklist / blacklist isn’t really being used, or being used at random. If you need a list of sites to add to your “Ad Blocking” filter, here’s mine:

borrellassociates.com
cablewholesale.com
comcastoffers.com
ebay.com
florist.com
lendingtree.com
lowermybills.com
lowquotesmortgage.com
lowratesource.com
nextag.com
nextstudent.com
vonage.com

I got an email back from Yahoo about this topic:

Just so that you are aware, Yahoo! Publisher Network beta was recently informed that we are experiencing a problem with the functionality of the Ad Blocking feature. The Ad Blocking feature is working intermittently or not at all. At this time, we are currently investigating the issue and the scope of those affected with no expectations for a resolution. We do anticipate resolution shortly.

Hopefully this targetting problem will be resolved soon–or I may become very tempted to try out Google Adsense again.

An article I wrote about well-designed blogs got more than 1,200 diggs yesterday, causing an influx of some 20,000 to 30,000 new visitors, each pulling down the following page elements:

• 10 large images totalling 969,582 bytes
• CSS and JS totalling 21,655 bytes
• HTML totalling 45,492 bytes

With over a dozen files per request, and 1 MB of transfer, it’s clear that a Digg or Slashdot will overload my poor server. However, there exists a global cache system called Coral Cache which can be used in times of stress to distribute abnormal, spiky load. This will save your onsite HTML and Wordpress system from being hit every time a visitors comes through one of those high traffic sites. Since these visitors will be setting their referrer field, we can identify them, create a special cache redirect URL for them, send them there, and exit. No messy rendering needed.

Yesterday I opted for a solution with mod_rewrite and .htaccess to send traffic to Flickr and Coral Cache instead of my server. It looked like this:

# Digg Effect
RewriteBase /wp/
RewriteRule ^archives/2006/04/16/top-ten-best-designed-blogs[/]? elliottback.com.nyud.net:8080/wp/?p=1351 [R,L]
RewriteRule ^wp-content/uploads/2006/04/10-best-sites-01.* static.flickr.com/56/130439205_51ccaa4a21_o.jpg [R,L]
[...]
RewriteRule ^wp-content/uploads/2006/04/10-best-sites-10.* static.flickr.com/49/130439322_f0ba846651_o.jpg [R,L]
RewriteRule ^wp-content/themes/greenmarinee/index.css elliottback.com.nyud.net:8080/wp/wp-content/themes/greenmarinee/style.css [R,L]

Making a Plugin

Clearly this won’t work for a general solution. Instead, we’ll take advantage of Wordpress’ new cache hook, which is the symlink advanced-cache.php in the wp-content folder. There’s one problem–there could already be something there. So, we’ll have to follow the following flow:

1. If advanced-cache.php doesn’t exist, create it pointing to us
2. If advanced-cache.php exists, create it pointing to us, and include_once() whatever it pointed to when we’re done.

Then we just redirect to a Coral Cache version of our page. This way, when your Wordpress blog gets hit by a DDOS from the popular linksites, it can respond quickly and fluidly without having to load all of your plugins, Wordpress, or even make a single mySQL database call. This will optimize the performance significantly. There’s going to be a problem if something else–say WP-Cache is installed after us, and steals our symlink, but I’ll just have Digg Defender repeat the initialization steps on every activation.

The second part will be a post_content filter that rewrites all external references in the post, such as js or images, to use Coral Cache links–but only for the Coral Cache robots. This way, Coral Cache will cache a copy of the html of a page which has been injected with Coral Cache links everywhere else. Not a single Digg user request will ever touch your website, because Coral Cache will act as a continuous buffer.

Features

• Prevents high-traffic sites from overloading your site
• Integrates Coral Cache with Wordpress
• Runs before WP loads
• Compatible with WP-Cache
• Extremely fast (benchmarks coming soon!)

Download

Version 1.0 of the plugin can be downloaded as a 4KB zip file: digg-defender.zip. It contains four files:

• digg-defender-config.php
• digg-defender-functions.php
• digg-defender-phase1.php
• digg-defender.php

These are contained in a folder called digg-defender.

Installation

Extract the folder digg-defender, copy it to your wordpress/wp-content/plugins/ folder, and activate the plugin in your admin interface. It will spit out numerous textual warnings and errors if permissions are incorrectly set. Note that if WP-Cache is also installed, only raw pages will be buffered, and not their contents, because WP-Cache will have already cached the page.

Support

If you encounter any bugs, or can suggest a website I add to the hitlist, please leave a comment. Currently the plugin recognizes the following sites: digg.com, slashdot.com, slashdot.org, fark.com, somethingawful.com, kuro5hin.org, engadget.com, boingboing.net, and del.icio.us. I am testing this on my main production blog as we speak, so if there are problems I will probably encounter them first. Update: Please note that Coral Cache is hit/miss and can be slow sometimes to load. That’s not my fault–reload or wait for it to finish loading.

Update

A little update fixes a couple of possible typos / bugs in servers with base_dir restrictions.

I found a random spammy tech blog the other day that does have a very nicely placed wide-format top adsense strip. They stuck right under a header that fades to white, so it’s very prominent and aesthetically pleasing. To improve on the idea one would want to integrate the ad a little more with the header, rather than under it, and also increase the brilliance of its text colors. But, here’s a picture:

I’m looking to increase my CTR in the next round of blog design, while at the time making the ads more a natural part of the layout. Something along these lines seems like the perfect place to start. It’s also, if you’ve looked at the heatmaps that Google gives out, apparently an officially good place to put ads.