2 widgets say good-bye from the Phoenix Area Real Estate blog

For anyone that’s visited the blog recently, I’ve had what appeared to be some very slow response times.  At first, I was blaming DNS configuration (or perhaps mis-configuration) that may have resulted from the DNS changes I was forced to do when my telecom provider recently changed my T1 into the office last Thursday.  This evening, I decided it was time to chase down that red herring and see what was up.  I didn’t find anything necessarily wrong, but I made a couple of changes which may improve the blog’s performance.

Not convinced things were truly better; I found a strange error that started showing up in the web error logs back on November 21.  The error was “File name too long”, which I believe means a URL has resolved to longer than 255 characters.  At the same time, in the web access logs (which shows every page ever accessed, and by which IP address), some crazy new pages started being accessed on November 21, and all of them had something similar to the following as a URL:

GET /2007/11/27/tpc-desert-course-reopens-as-the-tpc-champions-course/function%20()%20%7B%20%20%20%20var%20iterator%20=%20Prototype.K,%20args%20=%20$A(arguments);%20%20%20%20if%20(typeof%20args.last()%20==%20%22function%22)%20{%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20iterator%20=%20args.pop();%20%20%20%20}%20%20%20%20var%20collections%20=%20[this].concat(args).map($A);%20%20%20%20return%20this.map(function%20(value,%20index)%20{return%20iterator(collections.pluck(index));});}

I don’t want to bore anyone with what that might mean, but let’s just say, “it isn’t right”.  Of course, knowing it isn’t right, and knowing what to do about it, are 2 different things.  Alas I narrowed it down to Criteo.  Criteo is supposed to be an auto blogroll widget that automatically displays other blogs that have content similar to the Phoenix Area Real Estate Blog. It was ok at doing that, but it was better at spamming my server with 35 (literally) of these strange GET requests for each and every home page hit.  I believe this is what was slowing the server down the most.  So Criteo was removed as of today. 

I also did away with BlogRush.  BlogRush is similar to Criteo, but instead of taking you to a blog, it takes you to a post on a blog.  As far as I could tell, BlogRush was well behaved, but I can’t find any evidence that anyone ever clicked on it, so it’s gone. 

And finally, in what is definitely an error of omission, I want to announce that Kelley Koehler’s The Housechick Blog has found its way to my blogroll.  Kelley if you are reading this, your school allegiance, however mis-guided, had nothing to do with this mistake. 

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