Hawk Wings is moving moved to a new home at TextDrive today, from one server to another.

The site did disappear for a bit, and is still a bit wobbly. It will bed down though.hawkwings, hosting, textdrive, momentary pause

This morning I got a polite but firm email from my web host.

Hawk Wings, it said, needs optimisation:

Your site attracts a lot of visitors which translates to a lot of hits and bandwidth (we’re talking about 100K hits yesterday, and 18 GB of bandwidth used in April). To compare: … In the past four days, your site has spawned almost *two times more* PHP processes than the next nine users combined, on the server. Also, your site used *four times more* time spent in running MySQL queries than then the next nine users combined.

Obviously that’s a nice problem for me to have, but not so nice for the other sites on the shared server.

I teach Ancient Greek in my day job, a skill of limited use when it comes to blog optimisation.

Luckily, Hawk Wings reader and professional web site designer Brady J Frey knew exactly what to do. He whipped through the code and without making too many rude remarks, cleaned it up and made it much more efficient.

It feels faster and leaner to me. I hope it will to TextDrive too. If not, things like the Recent Posts list and the tag cloud will start disappearing off the front page.

Personally, I can’t thank or recommend Brady highly enough. He was fantastic. The professional services that his design company dotfive offers are sure to be even better.hawk wings, textdrive, hosting, mail.app, apple mail, bandwidth, optimization, dotfive, big props to Brady Frey

A web site called Butter Fat offers you the opportunity to track the path of your emails using Google Maps, using geographical lookup provided by hostip.info.

Paste in the headers of an email and it traces the jumps from server to server. If you choose your email carefully, it can also show you the location of a particular server.

It may not do a very good job. I discovered, for example, that the mail server at my new web host TextDrive is housed in the middle of Montgomery Field Airstrip in San Diego:

Perhaps it does a better job with .Mac. At least, the trace places the server on the same map as Infinite Loop, in leafy September Drive:

Who knows? It is, at any rate, an entertaining and interesting way to waste thirty minutes or so.email, traceroute, Google maps, dotmac, .mac, textdrive, servers, Cupertino