Suicide by search engine is similar ins concept to the idea of suicide by cop. Basically your blog tries to kill itself by getting lots of search engines to overwhelm it. Ok, I’ll admit it, my current hosting provision is a bit cheap, and my blog is a bit lazy. The cheapness is because I wanted a full server with root access but mostly just to play around with. So I have one (well a virtual one) but it’s not exactly highly powered. Still my blog isn’t what you’d call a hive of activity, most of the people I get on the site are looking at other random pages still hanging about in the site infrastructure. It’s what happens when you’ve had stuff online for 8 years and don’t tend to clean up after your self.
And then there’s my laziness, I could have rolled my own blog. Heck my first blog was in 2001 and was just a bunch of cron scripts and a file I just had open in my text editor. It was great right up until I had to take it down because it was the number one response from Google when you searched for my company site, oops. But I was lazy and went to route of Wordpress. Now don’t get me wrong, Wordpress is lovely and shiny and you can get cool plugins to do things like post to Twitter and Livejournal whenever you post. But it’s also suicidal.
My nice shiny new Virtual Server has a been a bit flaky, I’ve done a bunch of things to try and fix it. Removing stuff that was running that wasn’t required, trying to make sure the Wordpress fake Cron worked correctly and so forth but it still had a tendency to crash. Generally right after I posted something, which as you might guess was a bit annoying. So I tried a few things and finally nailed down the problem. If you are hosting a Wordpress blog and your site keeps getting hammered whenever you post, go check out the Writing Settings options. See by default Wordpress sends a request to Pingomatic when you post and update. This then tells all the search engines that you’ve blogged. And they all come and stomp up and down on your tiny server. Ooops.
So for now I’ve turned it off. I’m not that bothered if it takes Google or Bing a while to notice that I’ve posted and update if it means the site doesn’t fall over. If anyone else has any cool ways round this (that don’t involve me buying a bigger box) I’d love to hear them.
Have fun and stay slinky.