I am trying to hold my patience as people email me asking about a free service I have given for years, for which I get no money, and is running on a server I do not even have access to. Where is the notion that if you set up something for free, give it away, that you are also there to hand hold them through every last step?

I want a big DIY sign.

My first step was to implement an extra layer of caching, where I cached the rendered HTML and support 304 headers (e-tags). Then I increased the delay in updates to 3 hours. We’ll see how it goes.

In terms of redirection, I was thinking more in terms of a kind of distributed load-balancing, rather than a straight redirect, but that seems pretty fanciful.

I considered throwing an extra line in there “sponsored by…”, which might put some people off, but some sites and content are really not things we’d want to be associated with.

Other ideas were to just start sending back empty data to the most egregious users, and then at some point change it to a (more or less) obnoxious message. That was in my weaker moments!

David

The low end solution is you just remove it, generate lots of broken sites, and create ill-will out on the net, not much of an option. My approach, when I get a new “master” site, is to simply set up a htaccess re-direct from my old site to the new– this seamlessly transfers all request, including the embedded JavaScript. Or you could do the redirect for the script only, and then post a notive on the main site to say “This has been moved”.

I should have some notes to share later this week.

Crazy stuff.

BTW, other sites out there are technically not “mirrors”, since a failure to one site does not go to the next, more like clones. I found 127 other sites where you can build a feed:

http://www.google.com/search?q=feed2js%2Fbuild.php

I’ve been running an older copy of feed2js and while it hasn’t gone down, I’ve run into a very similar situation, where I moved on to different pastures and the service has more or less just kept running.

I checked on it recently, and it was getting over 600,000 hits a day, including hits from an official AOL site. That kind of traffic is not really sustainable without explicit sponsorship.

I am not sure what the solution is, but something other than just a mirror site may be needed. Some way to redirect traffic, but that sounds a bit difficult.

Regards

David