Archive for July, 2009

Crash, bang, wallop!

Tuesday, July 28th, 2009

Apologies if you’ve had any difficulties accessing the website over the past couple of weeks.

It’s mostly been up, but I’ve been away on holiday in France (with only occasional internet access) and the site has crashed three or four times over that period.

And although the BBC Radio programme gave a welcome boost to traffic on the site, it was broadcast while I was away too, which didn’t help.

One crash was caused by yet another website copier (grrr!) and I’ve now taken steps to prevent this happening again.

I’m not absolutely sure what the other crashes were caused by, but I’m currently working on optimising memory usage in the server. That (together with some superglue  / krazy glue, the inside of a toilet roll and a couple of bits of sticking plaster over the worst crash locations) should help make it a lot more robust in future.

Chris

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Crash!

Sunday, July 5th, 2009

I knew it would be tempting fate to say that the website hadn’t crashed.

No sooner had I written the last blog when … CRASH … down it came.

I tracked it down to an IP address in Italy and I’m pretty sure it was a website crawler (or copier) rather than a malicious attack. Nonetheless, it was requesting several pages a second (by contrast the googlebot requests one page every 30-40 seconds) and although the server stayed up for two hours serving pages at a furious rate, eventually it was overloaded.

Anyway, I think I’ve fixed it now. (And if you are a user whose ISP is Telecom Italia Net and you’d like to get access again – please fix your crawler to be a little more polite and then get in touch. I don’t want to exclude anyone who’s genuinely interested in visiting the site.)

Chris

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Two weeks in

Sunday, July 5th, 2009

Well, the website’s been live for two weeks now and hasn’t crashed once.

It has been up and down plenty of times as I fixed things (sorry if this has affected you) and in particular I spent ages trying to sort out different character encodings in abc files that were causing all sorts of headaches (I’m still having nightmares about UTF-8 and ISO-8859-1, but my therapist tells me it should be better in a few years time). However, the site hasn’t actually crashed.

In fact, the clustr map is showing over two and a half thousand visits from all over the world and my own log is showing a wide variety of searches. Unfortunately, a lot of people are searching for pop, rock and other copyright tunes, which I know for sure aren’t listed in the tune search, but I hope they find something of interest.

The forums haven’t taken off in a bit way yet – maybe they never will. To be honest, I hadn’t even planned on including them for the initial site relaunch (though I was planning to add them later). And then I found this very tempting “install” button on the website control panel provided my web hosts … and an hour or so later, there they were (the power of software!). But time will tell if they are going to be useful or not.

This blog was a similar discovery. I hadn’t even thought about having one originally. I’m not sure how active it’s going to be, but its probably the best place to keep up to date with changes to the site (though major changes will be announced).

Anyway, I hope everyone who’s visiting is finding the new site helpful and easy to use.

Chris

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Metallica

Wednesday, July 1st, 2009

Anyone who has visited the abc tune search more than once since the site was launched (just over a week ago) may have noticed the gradual evolution of the paragraph above the search box.

It’s gone through several variations already in the last week and now says:

IMPORTANT NOTE: Sorry, but there are no scores or lyrics for pop/rock music in the abc tune search (though you could try here). See the search help page for reasons why not.

Naively, I had imagined that people searching for stuff here would be looking for traditional music, so I hadn’t thought such a clarification was necessary.

But of course, you can easily end up on the tune search from a Google search, with no context about what abc is or isn’t and where it comes from.

And when I started to look at the logs of what people were searching for, it became clear that indeed that is happening.

Although mostly the searches are what you might expect (especially if you’re familiar with traditional music – someone, somewhere, has just done a search for “Scatter the mud”), already I’ve seen searches for Metallica, Iron Maiden and some Beatles songs.

So anyway, I put the paragraph up just so as not to strain the server with searches which are almost certain to be fruitless.

And then a couple of days later I found out about the LOTRO collections – at least one of which does indeed have Metallica songs in abc format.

However, they’re still not in the tune search (copyright issues and all that).

Chris

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