Apologies. I’ve been so busy writing for money this week in the other place 
that I haven’t had much time to post on Hawk Wings. (The first week of the month is always the worst).
Last Friday was the site’s first birthday. It’s come a long way and got a lot more focussed than the first post promised.
Entirely by coincidence Hawk Wings celebrated by breaking through the 10,000 mark in Technorati’s blog ranking system. (Like Daniel Jalkut I find Technorati disturbingly addictive. No doubt that’s part of the secret to the site’s success).
It’s a questionable measure of quality, but it means there are now only 8,965 blogs you would rather be reading than this one. ;-)
It’s been a fun year for me. I’ve learnt a lot about blogging, about WordPress and about Mail and OS X’s other productivity apps. I’ve enjoyed the interaction with the readers more than anything perhaps and the new friendships it has brought.
The blog has done better than it deserves to. While it’s a labour of love and not designed to make a profit, it has landed me other paying jobs, which are starting to affect what I want to do day-to-day. Life-changing stuff.
There are also problems.
Last week I had another email from TextDrive, telling me that Hawk Wings probably needs to move. The email said that Hawk Wings regularly does “about 100K hits daily, with bandwidth ranging in 400 to 800 MB a day.” They started placing blocks on all traffic from particular sites to keep the server alive.
It’s putting to much load on the shared server and making life difficult for other users. Obviously, TextDrive is right; that’s not good and it’s not fair. TextDrive suggests moving to a more robust (and more expensive) hosting solution.
In the short-term, I’ve killed the tag cloud in the sidebar and a few other bits and pieces that increased the site’s demands on the server.
In the medium term, I’ll need to move to another hosting package, hopefully still with TextDrive. I really like its philosophy and the tech support is excellent. But either way, it will mean coughing up more money to keep the site alive.
Quite a few people have donated already. To them I am very grateful.
If you haven’t, I am asking you to help. If you like the kind of things that Hawk Wings posts about, if it has made your email life better or boosted your productivity, consider making a donation to support its future.
You can make a donation via the PayPal button on the blog’s front page or since you are doing me a favour, I’ll bring the button to you:
Here’s to another year as enjoyable as the first!
Tags:
Address Book,
Apple Mail,
email,
hawk wings,
iCal,
mail.app,
personal,
Productivity,
quicksilver,
thunderbird
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