Filament Feeds are going away… Maintenance tonight… Slow week ahead.
Three topics in the title, let’s get through them one by one, starting with the easiest…
Site is in needs of some basic maintenance. Some plugins that help run it need updates, etc. This usually goes smooth, but on occasion things can get borked. So, if you happen to visit the site overnight, and something is not working, chances are i’m aware since i probably caused it 🙂
The “Big One” – Filament Feeds are going away… definitely for a while, possibly permanently.
Data is the biggest expense the site currently has, dwarfing all other expenses combined by a factor of 4-5. About 80% of that data is consumed by Filament Feeds. It’s been a year now since Feeds have been implemented and traffic on the site remains exactly the same – same number of daily visitors, etc. So Feeds are not helping to draw in new traffic… at all.
But…
Regulars seem to like at least some Feed pages. Today’s Deals is used by 25% of the site’s daily visitors, and Schedule Page is by about 15%, which tells me that people find these to be “useful”. I wish i could say the same about Filament Feeds, which get 1.5% for Main, and a whopping 0.7% for Alt, which i can only politely describe as “not as useful”. Again, these Filament Feeds account for about 80% of data consumed by the site.
I pay for data. It’s fractions of a penny for each item, but at the end of the month it adds up to real money. I’m fine with it as a “loss leader”, but it at least has to produce some kind of results. Today’s Deals and Schedule Page are working just fine in that sense. They will probably never break even, but at least people use them, so they’re staying. Filament Feeds are going… whether permanently or not is still to be decided. I’m tempted to keep them, and will try to create a slimmer version that doesn’t consume as much data (less items, updates, etc), but we’ll see. 3D Printer and Resin Feeds stopped being updated months ago, after they went though a streak of 3 visitors combined for both feeds in a course of a calendar week…. needless to say – those are going, and are probably not coming back.
Which brings me to the last topic – site will be slow this week. Planning to spend the free time focusing on reworking/fixing the feeds, and finally installing a new grid. Things won’t be dead, but slow…
I’m embarrassed… I never even looked at that tab. I always just load the default top level page to see what’s new.
I’m guessing the bandwidth is caused by crawlers since it’s not being used by people?
Update your /robots.txt, maybe? (it’s wide-open)