Mercwear.com – Curtis Morris

So I go to check my web stats yesterday with Urchin and find a weird anomaly in my traffic, it has more than tripled for the month of December. My average traffic use is around 15GB a month, for December it’s going to be about 50GB, this of course worried me. Having worked in the web hosting industry for the past 3 years I know what a traffic spike usually means: You are hacked.

Luckily this was not the case in my situation, after about 3 hours of sleuthing I found the culprit that was causing my traffic spike: A single image that I posted over 1 year ago. An image of Jason Alexander (George on Seinfeld) wishing everyone a happy Festivus. The traffic came from a both Google image search and myspace.com, I am guessing that someone at Myspace went to Google and did an image search for the word “Fesivus” and hot linked the image from Mercwear, sucking down my bandwidth at an average rate of 600k/sec.

It is amazing how fast the image spread at Myspace.com, I did some traffic sniffing on the server and noticed over 30 hits in 25 seconds from different profiles on the site. The evil part of me wanted to replace the image with something vulgar however the cheapskate in me did not want to pay for even more bandwidth.

Below are some of the Urchin pages that show the traffic:

Total hits for the image file:

Total hits from Google and Myspace:

Total transfer over the last 5 days for the image:

404 error count since I enabled the hotlink protection:

I found that the best way to stop this was to simply disallow hotlinking to Mercwear, I did this by utilizing a tool called Hotlink Blocker from www.helicontech.com, if you use IIS for your webserver I highly recommend checking it out.

I also use my Robots.txt file to exclude all of my images from being indexed by Google, this will cut down on the possibility of this happening again, adding the following code to your robots.txt will stop the Google image crawler from indexing your images:

User-agent: Googlebot-Image
Disallow: /

Is this site worth a million bucks? I don’t think so but you be the judge.

www.milliondollarhomepage.com

News covrage of the site

A buddy at work sent this to me.. It’s a craigslist.org ad for an XBOX 360, there is more to it than that so read the ad!

Xbox 360 for only $100.00

This clip has been radiating throughout the internet since last Sunday, it aired on Saturday Night Live on 12/17/2005. I really can’t decide on a favorite part, but if I had to pick one it would probably be when they use Yahoo maps to find the “dopest route”.

This film has Starwars Kid potential in my opinion, the masterminds behind the short are The Lonely Island group (http://www.thelonelyisland.com/) who joined SNL this year.

Lazy Sunday (Requires Flash to watch)

For the really big fans of the skit (like me!) here is a link to the MP3 (not sure on the quality as I have not tested it yet):

Download “Lazy Sunday Mp3�

Thanks to Andrea for showing it to me, it’s definitely one of the best SNL skits in a long time.

I came across this link today on Slashdot, the list includes the following:

Atomic Bomb Mod (My personal favorite)
Toilet Mod
Microwave Mod

Full List

It’s that time of year again – Google has posted it’s annual Zeitgeist. For those of you that don’t quite know what this is, allow me to explain:

In it’s basic form Zeigeist is just a list of the top searches on Google for the past year, however if you are interested there is MUCH more to delve into! The site will show you strange trends, cultural changes and other “strange� data.

Take a look:

http://www.google.com/press/zeitgeist2005.html

While posing the Forbes article below I noticed a new Google ad on my site for a movie called “Hostel�. The only reason it caught my eye is because it said “Presented by Quentin Tarantino� and I’m a big fan.

The movie looks to be a horror / action movie based on actual events, something like saw. Check out the site and trailer before, if you don’t like scary stuff then just move along (I am looking at you Andrea!).

Hostel Film Site

Forbes has an interesting write up on what they are calling the “Fictional 15�. They have taken 15 fictional characters that have been elevated to the status of real people in terms of popularity and wealth.

Some of the names include Santa Clause, C. Montgomery Burns and Cruella De Vil, good stuff.

Link to the full story:
The Forbes Fictional 15