Elliott C. Back » Milestones

We’re Growing, Baby

Elliott Back — Thu, 07 Sep 2006 04:29:49 +0000

Here’s where I get to brag and throw up a graph of traffic numbers. Since 2004, we grew 2100% in 2005 to pull in 2,797,939 visitors that year. 2006 is even bigger, showing a 500% increase since ‘04. This year, we should have at least 14,244,632 visitors:

That kind of growth per-year is great for us. If you’re interested in a more fine-grained approach to our traffic data, check out this graph:

The only flaw in the graph is May/June of this year, where I had hosting trouble with 1and1 for a week, had to transfer to Dreamhost, and then had to transfer again to Cari.net who is great. If we didn’t have that bad period, we’d probably be doing a lot better right now–but who’s complaining? The Elliott Back Blog Network rocks!

10,000,000 Served

Elliott Back — Tue, 18 Jul 2006 23:16:48 +0000

I’d like the announce that since its inception nearly two years ago, this blog network has passed the 10 million served mark. Over the last year, we’ve had phenomenal growth:

People also seem to be talking about us, or at least using products we’ve written:

Posts that contain Elliott Back per day for the last 30 days.

In fact, this blog is around the 1,300th most linked blog on Technorati. It’s going to be hard to penetrate into that top 500, but I’m going to do it! Goals over the next year include the usual doubling page impressions, rolling out a new theme, some new sites, and better ad placement. *clapclapclap*

Identity Theft & Mistaken Identity

Elliott Back — Sat, 17 Jun 2006 02:19:09 +0000

Ever since my name and address became basically public information, and my blog decently read, I’ve had interesting experiences with various kinds of identity confusion. Some of it is cute, some of it is malicious, and some of it plainly scary. It’s strange that the content of blog, which sometime is just a mirror, can confuse me with otherwise notable individuals! Perhaps if I had some way of absorbing the identities, brains, and bank accounts of the people confused with me I’d like it more.

Christopher Paolini

A beautiful photo of a dragonfruit, which looks difficult to eat

The author of award-winning children’s fantasy novels Eragon and Eldest is certainly not I, and yet a post which was supposed to clear the matter up only made it worse. Here is a small selection of the fanmail I’ve received over the years:

A short story titled Warriors of Lost Time. The story is obsessed with adjective razor-sharp (“… me with a scimitar and small gladiator shield that’s razor sharp all around, Drake with a razor sharp crescent blade …”), includes completely unbelievable events (“That’s when we realized that we had slept for 45 years without knowing it…”), and abuses narrative surprise (“So we went to the mountains and tried to mine but we found dwarves. Dwarves! We couldn’t believe our eyes.”).
Many short inquiries of the nature, “if this is christophere paolini please email me back cos i want to ask some questions and i love ure books.”
International fanmail, “I am 17-aged Corean girl, (do you know ‘Corea’ anyway?).”

A Wedding Photographer

A couple being married; hopefully happy

It was interesting when I received an email asking for wedding photography services:

My wife and i are planning to have our wedding on September 27th, 2006 at St Paul’s Church Bow Common Burdett Road,. I am looking for the best photographer who will come and snapshot on the D-day and when i came across your email i was impressed.

It could have been a complicated bit of spam, but why would spam bother to ask me how much it would cost to have the photographs taken?

A Bored Housewife / Teenage Music Lover / Sickly Man

While I love listening to music and reading…

Apparently, I’m the kind of guy who needs to test his blood sugar frequently because of diabetes, because I was signed up for telemarketing information calls about blood meters. However, one call was all it took to get my name off their list.

I was also surprised to get “Jack Black: Welcome to BMG Music Service!” in my inbox one day. I would sign up for a CD club scheme, and yet somehow someone signed me up. A quick email took care of that problem.

The most recent “I’ve been signed up for services I didn’t want” episode was today’s Home & Garden magazine bill. I ask you–do I look like I’d read H&G?

Flemming Rose

Fire’s a bad way to die–aparently it’s quite hot.

According to the Nation, a Saudi Arabian newspaper claimed that an “Elliot Back” was the notorious editor of the “Mohammed Cartoons” and perished in a fire in his apartment. Unfortunately, neither is true. The actual culture editor of Jyllands Posten is Fleming Rose.

Various other Elliott, Elliot, Eliott, or Eliot forms

Someday someone is bound to think that I’m Missy Elliott. w00t!

Because I’ve owned the address elliott@cornell.edu for some time, people wanting to email any of the other e(l)+io(t)+@cornell.edu have often addressed me incorrectly. Moreover, I’ve had companies interview me and send congratulations to a different elliott@ email address, which has been a big turn off. The problem with being an Elliott is that there are so many ways to spell it. And that’s even without the Bäck/Back/Black/Beck problem. If there’s just four ways to spell my first name and four to spell my last name, you arrive at a good fifteen ways to ruin my name.

That’s right–you’ve got a 6.25% of ever getting it right.

1and1 Sucks: 1&1 Will Rip You Off

Elliott Back — Thu, 23 Mar 2006 04:16:30 +0000

As you can imagine, I’ve been having some trouble with 1and1. They nixed by site by placing some kind of “lock” on it. When I get that straightened out, I should be able to recover my images. Until then, I have an old backup of the images. I’m slowing restoring my other sites. What’s weird, though, is that I can’t get SSH access to my account.

Please ignore the mess–a new theme is coming soon. This is just a stopover stopgap method.

Update

Here is the email they sent me three days after locking my Business Hosting account:

Recently we have noticed that your web site(s)is consuming a disproportionate amount of server resources. Due to this, we have had to move your account off of the shared hosting server to an auxilliary server host. We will now request that you consider purchasing a Managed or Dedicated Server in order to continue hosting services with 1&1 Internet.

Your account was moved based on a decision made by the system administrators in order to improve the quality of service to the rest of our clients on the shared hosting server you were previously hosted on. Your account’s resource needs
were exceeding the capacity of that server to capably host the other accounts, thus it had to be moved to mitigate the server load. Though we could move your site back to the original shared hosting server, it is not recommended. Your account activity has showed that it deserves its own server to better suite its performance needs.

Please visit 1and1.com to review the server products we offer. You will have one(1) month to make a decision and migrate your account over to 1&1 server or another host provider. You can choose to return your account back to the shared server systems if you wish, provided that you take steps to reduce the load generated by your websites. If the account has to be moved off the
shared server system again you will only have the option of purchasing a dedicated server account to continue hosting with 1&1 Internet.

As I have received over 44,000 hits on this single website today (there are others, although they are still down), it makes sense that I might be overloading their poor shared server. However, they should at least have called or emailed me before taking any action that would impact the state of my website! If I do get a dedicated server in the future, it won’t be their’s.

Update 2

OK, dreamhost says I’m using about 940 cpu minutes a day, which is about 20 times more than I should be. Looks like I’ll need dedicated hosting soon, unless WP-cache really does drop my CPU usage by the 53x it claims. Here’s a graph of traffic impact, for the bored:

Update 3

As I really want them to return my files, I’ve sent the following snarky email to the 1and1 admins:

Dear 1and1 admins,

This is the third email I’ve sent you regarding this issue, three days from your initial notification, which was sent to me at least two days late after you locked my 1and1 account. I need immediate access to all of my files via SSH. Traffic has been redirected via DNS to another hosting provider, so no 1and1 resources will continue to be consumed at their former prodigious rate. As you specified below:

> You can choose to return your account back to the shared server systems if you wish, provided that you take steps to reduce the load generated by your websites.
Now that I have taken those steps, you must immediately:

1) Restore access to my business hosting account for elliottback.com
2) Notify me in writing thereof

Your response time and attention to customer service issues is terrible. If you do not restore access to my account and files in a reasonable amount of time, I may have to pursue legal or other non-desirable actions for your business.

Update 4

I called them last night, and a guy said he’d give me an update before the end of his shift. Admins are apparently scarce on weekends. Guess what? No update.

Update 5

Somehow I’ve got access again. Once I rip all my files, I’m going to cancel. Images should start working again in another hour or so. I’ve got a lot (100s of mb) to transfer, so it will be just a bit more!

Here are some more resources for people considering 1and1:

Blog Top Sites

Elliott Back — Thu, 02 Mar 2006 08:43:01 +0000

I’m currently #1 out of 15,205 blogs being tracked by BlogTopSites. I think it’s time to switch and / or add a more competitive blog tracker. I even have a 5k lead, which translates to about a 10% lead, on the next best guy:

Leave some ideas in the comments. I used to be on blogsoftheday before it went down…