ProteinSpill.com

Las Vegas Monorail and the AVN Expo

Ok, so I didn’t go just to ride the monorail and happen across the expo, but I’m trying to make this somewhat relevant. I’ve taken a few pictures, the first page is of monorail stuff then they get progressively more R-rated.

It was eerily familiar riding their trains. They have all the same squeaks and rattles. The ride was a bit bumpier at times, but that might be because their top speed is 50mph instead of 40. I liked the way the doors open and the wide open standing room in the center of the train. If Disney were to reconfigure the fleet this way, we might actually reach the rated capacity of 364 guests.

The other thing I really liked was the spiel. Volume was consistent throughout and the voices were different for different contexts. A woman’s voice was used for safety and destination information and then other voices were used for advertisements. Where have I heard that before? I also really liked how the spiel was repeated OUTSIDE the train where potential riders could actually hear it.

Obviously I’ve never been to Las Vegas. I’ve never even set foot in a strip club (though I used to run an Adult DVD website). So going to the expo was a bit of a culture shock for me. It was a lot of fun though. If you make it through all three pages of photos, you’ll note that I got to meet a few stars.

There were a LOT of people on the floor so I didn’t get to do much networking with salesfolk. I do think I’m better prepared to launch (and relaunch) my new sites soon. There will be more about that later.

Software Upgrades

Over the weekend I finally got around to upgrading to Gallery2. It’s pretty nice and integrates with WordPress well. If you registered as a user here contact me for your own photo album.

I also did a lot of work to cut down on referer spam. Not anything you’d really see, unless you go to Site Statistics. You’ll now notice it requires a login. Spammers have found that if they visit your site with a bogus referer (the “referer” is the site you came from to find proteinspill, like google.com) then your statistics will pick it up and display a link. When the search engines come around to index your site, it boosts their PageRank. Pretty sad really. Especially when you consider that I had noindex,nofollow on that link anyway—The search engines wouldn’t even see it.

I’m blocking those spammers two different ways. 1. I’m using Deny From in the Apache vhost.conf for specific IP addresses and subnets. Unfortunately this is a pain to keep up with…spammers use many compromised computers to get this done and it’s hard to tell what legitimate traffic looks like. Plus every time you change this file you have to reload the server. 2. I found a way to use mod_rewrite in .htaccess to actually search for the known bogus referers. When it encounters one of those, I issue a 301 Redirect with their referer as the destination. Their botnets will hit their own server! hehe

Finally, since I’m learning all about mod_rewrite, I changed the way the stories are linked. Instead of ?p=168 there is a much more meaningful URL to each story. Click on a story title to see what I mean. The old links still work too, but it caused the search engines to re-index my entire site last night. Lots of traffic all of a sudden!