2025-11-08

It's been about a year since I made the site public, and so far so good.

Here's some stats from recent months. It's getting 200K+ page views per day, with 30K+ unique users per day. Google Search reports that the site is being displayed on 14K+ search results per day, with 3K+ clicks from the results going to the site per day. The custom Google Search on the website has 3.5K+ queries per day.

The positive is that the site has grown much faster than I thought it would, but the negative is that the connection I had was starting to bog down from the usage. So, I increased the bandwidth to 5Gb fiber, which required purchasing a new gateway router (which I needed anyway to help with blocking attacks) and a switch and network cards that could handle the higher bandwidth. Since upgrading everything, the site seems to be a lot more stable.

A note on the new gateway router. It has a built-in firewall and threat analysis / blocking. It was eye-opening to see how many threats were being made to the site every day. Everything is pretty locked down in general, and so far I’m not aware of any attempted intrusions making it through to the web server, even prior to the gateway being installed, but it’s still crazy to see how many attempts are being made now that I have a way to quantify it. An average of about 150 a day.

I'll be updating the donations page soon to allow donations. Currently, it's the original page from the original site, with all of the links long outdated and no longer working. With the $950 in new equipment and an additional $70 a month for the increased bandwidth, I've had to push back some of the things that I had wanted to move forward with this past year, like purchasing an SSL certificate so that I can enable HTTPS access, purchasing analytic services / software so I could monitor things like "Top Pages", and purchasing search software that I can run in-house rather than using the custom Google Search because of the way Google blocks a lot of keywords in their searches. I've tried multiple free versions of analytic and search software, but none have provided results that I've felt were good enough to move them into the live environment. I have zero plans on implementing ads or pay walling the site with membership fees.

The next thing I'm looking to implement is still the SSL certificate since I think that will increase the search standings and allow visitors to feel more secure in visiting the site. I had hoped to do that with this year's tax return, but ended up needing the upgraded networking equipment more in order to stabilize the site. Once that's in place, I'll be looking at upgrading the computer hardware to have enough CPU / RAM / HD to support in-house search features, and then purchasing a search product (I don't want to put the cart before the horse by putting a resource-hungry search product on the current computer).

I've looked into ways of implementing FTP and other types of user management for being able to have creators to log in and upload new content. So far, all the ways I've looked at would require having a separate server set up to handle that for security reasons (see the section above on how many intrusion attempts the site gets) and deal with the additional resources needed for managing user accounts. For now, that's outside of my budget. That will hopefully change in the future, but at this point I think it's more important to use my limited budget for this on the things above before opening it up for new content. I would also have to consider a whole redesign if I opened it up to new content because I can't think of a good way to integrate the current archived files with their myriad different formats and structures with the uniformity that would be needed to implement a modern web content creation platform capable of handling dozens or hundreds of separate content creators. The options would be to either strip out most or all of the formatting of the current stories to import them into a content platform or keep the old stuff completely separate from new stuff as if it's two separate sites under one banner. But, those are decisions that I don't have to make any time soon, until I have the resources to implement them.

So, that's the current status and roadmap as of now. The next update will probably be at the point that I'm able to get an SSL certificate.

2024-12-25

The ASSTR-Mirror site is a work in progress. I highly missed ASSTR when it went down, and I greatly appreciated whoever did ASSTR.xyz for a couple years, but it looks like it is down for good also. Recently, I found myself in a position where I had a little bit of extra money to purchase a domain and a couple bits of hardware to upgrade an old PC for hosting the site, and some time off work recuperating from minor surgery and needing something to do to occupy my time and distract my thoughts. I'm not going in to this because I want to be the one to take on this responsibility, but because I haven't seen anyone else pick up the mantle and I don't want hundreds of thousands of stories covering decades to disappear from the internet.

I have pulled copies of pieces of ASSTR from multiple locations and have been stitching them together as much as possible without access to the original source or servers. It's a slow process since there are tens of thousands of broken links. Some links are repairable, and that is what I've been working on over the past several weeks. Unfortunately, some links are not repairable because I haven't been able to find copies of what they are pointing to. I'm getting thousands of links fixed each day, but with over a half-million total pages to go through to look and fix broken links, it's going to take quite a while. The broken links are greatly affecting Google search results, so fixing links is my biggest priority at the moment. It looks like Google is crawling the site about once every three days, and so far it's went from 7.5K to 16.7K to 20.7K to 31.8K pages indexed over the past two weeks. Even with 31.8K indexed in their searches, that's still only about 5% of the total pages on the site.

I am not a web designer, but I do have some background in programming from decades ago. As part of all of this, I've had to teach myself how to set up a web server, some basics of HTML, PHP, Java, and so on. Not enough to be fancy, but enough to understand how the original site's pages worked in order make it functional. I also had to figure out some type of workaround for searching (since I don't have the skills to build a search engine myself and can't afford to purchase one at this point). That's why progress on getting everything working is taking so long.

I am currently working on fixing bad links, finding missing pages to repopulate, and rewriting some code on pages that's outdated. After all the links and functionality issues are taken care of (at least as much as possible), I would like to be able to open the FTP back up for authors to start submitting again. That'll be a whole other learning experience, since I've never set up an FTP for multiple users to be able to access discrete locations before. Long-term, I want to get an SSL certificate for the site, but that's going to be a couple hundred dollars because the original site was put together using multiple subdomains so a wildcard SSL is the most economically feasible way to go in order to cover all the subdomains. Depending on the amount of traffic that the site gets (currently only a couple hundred visits per day), I may also have to look at moving it to a hosting provider instead of an old PC sitting in the corner of my home office.

So, all of that said, please excuse any errors you may encounter while things are being worked on, and I thank you for your patience and for visiting the site.