It's been brought to my attention that I (and anyone else who may be running my script) may be making the Blogspot problem worse with all the hits it gets from my status tests.

While there are some things that can be done to the script to mitigate some of the problems, I'm going to take it down for now, and am asking any others who may have done something similar to it to do the same. I'd also like to initiate a discussion about whether a) such a thing is a good thing to have (as several have told me) and b) if so, what the best way is to achieve it without exacerbating it.

[Update at 9:27AM PST]

Carey Gage comments:

Since you started your status check, I've been coming here, checking both your content and blogger's status before going to any blogspot sites. I think your idea was a good one, if only in terms of convenience.

But having ten blogs hitting on blogspot to check its status once every minute will undoubtedly aggravate his traffic problem and is also much more than is needed. One non-Blogspot site, checking once every five or ten minutes would be a convenience and would not add excessively to Blogspot's traffic.

Which one? You thought of it, you implemented it. I think you should do it to the exclusion of everyone else. If that gets you extra hits, well and good (if you want them). Can you handle the extra traffic generated by being a blogspot "gateway" without incurring the same traffic problems as he does?

Well, getting hits for the sake of hits was not necessarily the goal. I really did it for my own use, and for the use of my regular readers. I suspect that if people are coming just to see Blogspot status, they're not necessarily hanging around to read anything else. If that's the case, then it would make more sense to set up a separate page just for that (with a separate link to the blog), to minimize my own bandwidth.

Once every five minutes is twice as much as once every ten. It's a matter of how much data resolution we want to get. Just going from twice a minute to once would reduce the load by half.

Other thoughts?

Since you started your status check, I've been coming here, checking both your content and blogger's status before going to any blogspot sites. I think your idea was a good one, if only in terms of convenience.

But having ten blogs hitting on blogspot to check its status once every minute will undoubtedly aggravate his traffic problem and is also much more than is needed. One non-Blogspot site, checking once every five or ten minutes would be a convenience and would not add excessively to Blogspot's traffic.

Which one? You thought of it, you implemented it. I think you should do it to the exclusion of everyone else. If that gets you extra hits, well and good (if you want them). Can you handle the extra traffic generated by being a blogspot "gateway" without incurring the same traffic problems as he does?

Well, getting hits for the sake of hits was not necessarily the goal. I really did it for my own use. I suspect that if people are coming just to see Blogspot status, they're not necessarily hanging around to read anything else. If that's the case, then it would make more sense to set up a separate page just for that (with a separate link to the blog), to minimize my own bandwidth.

Once every five minutes is twice as much as once every ten. It's a matter of how much data resolution we want to get. Just going from twice a minute to once would reduce the load by half.

Other thoughts?

Blogspot hosts perhaps a hundred thousand sites, and gets millions of hits per hour. Your pinging is negligible.

The concern was not me per se, but copycats.

Would it be possible for a couple of sites to do the actual ping and other sites to "mirror" - id est, load the graphic that shows the current result - from them? Or would that create too much of a load on the site hosting the appropriate graphic?

Myria

That's a good thought. The problem that I see is that if the graphic was changed, but kept the same file name (which is the only way that it seems to me that you could do it without pinging blogspot yourself to see which graphic to get), you'd have to disable local browser cache to update it.