HalfEagle.com’s Blog

I got an email last night from one of the bloggers whose content is included on HalfEagle. It seems there maybe a problem with how HalfEagle checks your site for updated content. The problem? HalfEagle may be accessing your site far more often than necessary.

First, I’m very sorry if this has affected your server. I manage a number of servers and I know how frustrated I get every time I discover some poorly programmed script hammering away at one of my servers.

Also, I fully realize that this is most likely caused by a script which I poorly programmed. That’s an embarrasing thing to admit, but I’m not going to pretend like I’m the greatest programmer in the world. Hopefully, I’ll be good enough to find my mistake and fix it. 

Meanwhile, and this is the “I need your help” part, it will help me considerably if you could check your stats or log files and look for excessive visits from a particular IP address that starts with 72.3. When I say excessive, I mean more than a thousand visits a day. If you are affected, it should stand out.

Normal usage is for the HalfEagle “bot” to swing by and check your feed every 15-45 minutes or so.

If you find anything, please email it to me directly at gregg (at) halfeagle.com.

Thank you.

P.S. Once this is all sorted out, I’ll post back with more information. Unfortunately, I leave for summer camp tomorrow. So if it isn’t fixed before then, I will disable all updates on HalfEagle until I get back and can determine the issue. I hope it doesn’t come to that, but I simply cannot allow this site to cause any undue stress on anyone else’s server.

You probably noticed a change to the home page of HalfEagle. Namely, that block in the right sidebar with a picture of the cover of “Spirit of Adventure” and some links to book reviews by HalfEagle’s Scouting bloggers. A gentleman working with the publisher of the book had contacted myself and a number of prominent Scouting bloggers asking if we’d be willing to receive an advance copy of the book. I accepted and within a week or so, I was digging into a softcover pre-release edition of the book. And let me tell you, it’s a fantastic read. Every chapter is the story of what a different Eagle Scout is doing in his adult life and how that ties back to his experiences in Scouting.

I wanted to help promote this book, not because I got a free copy, but because I sincerely believe this book will have a positive impact. But, although I’m an avid reader, I’m not much of a writer. Writing an eloquent book review that would motivate people to purchase the book is a skill with which I do not have much practice. What I did have though, is a website that reaches hundreds of the most influential and connected Scouters on the Internet. Oh hey, that’s you!

Because many of HalfEagle’s bloggers were already posting reviews, I simply added a “widget” to the sidebar that displayed any post containing the book’s title and the author’s name. Plus, I added a link to Amazon — not to get rich,* but so I could see if people would actually buy a book through HalfEagle.

In the end, I really liked having that feature on HalfEagle and I really liked seeing how the different bloggers covered the same book. I’d like to do more of this in the future and, perhaps, build a new section of the site just to pull together content about different Scouting books and products. You’ll see some new experiments in this direction in the future and I hope you’ll provide your feedback in the comments below.

Scouting bloggers, I’ll let you know how to get your posts included in these features in the future, although it will probably be some kind of keyword based filtering.

*I didn’t get rich. In fact, only four people clicked on the Amazon link and, if they bought a copy, they didn’t buy it from Amazon. Incidentally, even I forgot to buy through HalfEagle when I pre-ordered a handful of copies as gifts. Whoops! lol