I’m getting quite irritated with Internet Explorer, again. Remember that web project I told you about last week? Well, the main reason that I was having a hard time with it was that IE refused to show the javascript correctly, even though Firefox and Opera rendered it quite well. The thing that puzzled me was that the javascript was taken from one of those free resources online and their example worked like a charm but mine didn’t even though the two were identical.

So what was the root of the problem? It turns out that IE6 will not render Javascript offline; it will only do so online.

@#$%&!

Despite the fact that Wordpress released version 2.1 almost 30 days ago, I still haven’t gotten around to upgrading my blog. Why? Well, one reason should be the annoying fact that I upgraded this blog 3 times in the span of two weeks because the WP people released version 2.0.6, 2.0.7 and 2.1 days apart from each other. It was annoying how I’d login to my site and then see the notice up on the Dashboard that a new version is up yet again after I’ve upgraded days before. >.<

But the main reason now would be because on the advent of 2.1, several of the WP template tags have been deprecated and they won’t work with future versions anymore. Most of the tags I use that are now deprecated are:

• wp_list_cats
• wp_list_categories
• get_archives
• and the wonky listing of links in 2.1

Yes, I’m being lazy but I want to see some more changes in WP before I do some remodeling. Or maybe I’ll just wait for new version to come up.

I know I should be grateful that they’re indexing my sites frequently. That would mean that we’re getting more exposure and more people visit the site.

But should their indexing take up so much bandwidth?! I mean for one subdomain alone, we got 14gb of used bandwidth within 7 days. Isn’t that insane? Shouldn’t our bandwidth be reserved for people who actually have an interest on our site, rather than robotic machines that only report back to google about our pages?

Bandwidth doesn’t come for free; in fact, it’s rather expensive if any exceeded bandwidth is not part of your hosting plan. How expensive? Just imagine that a few months ago, this blog racked up 100gb of bandwith, and yes, just for this little blog alone.

Now our hosting package only allows for 20gb per month and that’s more than enough for us. Unfortunately, we didn’t expect the googlebot to ransack it.

How about using the robots.txt file? People say it works.

It doesn’t. I tried it for several months and it did stabilize my bandwidth towards the middle but in the end my bandwidth is still sky-rocketing.

Now if only I knew how to stop googlebot from sucking up our bandwidth and yet not lose our page ranking in google. T_T