Tuesday, September 09, 2008

Yo Mac Users

What is the feature that is built into the browsers that makes it so that if you leave a page up it automatically refreshes the page every minute or whatever interval you set it at? Is it in the browser or an add on or what exactly is it? Because that is the culprit in a lot of these cases where my website traffic is running into the thousands of hits per day.

Nevermind, seems it could be any machine and browser. And there's a lot of options for doing that sort of thing. But it's a moot point now because this blog will be only way anyone will be able follow what the new releases are anyway. Well, I guess they can copy and paste the link into a head's up thread on the forums too...

21 comments:

Rick said...

I have used a Mac for a lot of years and use Safari and Firefox, but have never come across that feature. Maybe I just missed it as a built in feature.

Ken said...

FF has an extension called 'refresh every" that will do that. you can even set if for 5 seconds i think.

Anonymous said...

Hey Peter
how bout a test run with the new system in place:)--

Ed

Adrian said...

Wow. As a Mac user, I had thought so much better of my fellow Mac'ers. I had always figured such treachery was more of a PC thing!

Anonymous said...

Opera has a timed reload feature built-in. Neither Safari nor Firefox do. FireFox has a plug-in called ReloadEvery that adds the feature.

Of course, if it's the RSS feed that's being continually reloaded, every feed reader in the business autoloads those.

Peter Atwood said...

OK, so it's not a Mac thing per se...interesting, thanks fellas.

Anonymous said...

You would think with the money you make you could afford a few thousand hits to your website. My site has 10K unique users a day with over 100K hits and I pay 9.95 a month for service. You should switch providers or have put your stuff on ebay if you can't handle the traffic.

Just sayin..

Ryan said...

Firefox has an add-on called ReloadEvery that reloads a webpage at a specified time period. I have never used it on Mac but it does work on the PC version of FF. Great for watching woot-offs.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/115

Unknown said...

There is a safari feature called "web clippings" that allows you to watch a certain portion of a webpage as if it was a dashboard widget. I dont know how often it refreshes though.

B said...

Unscrupulous Mac users can easily create an Apple Script that tells Safari to refresh the browser every x seconds.

Like the new blog template btw!

Omer Bila said...

It could be a widget Peter (if its a Mac) or a gadget (if its a PC). Basically a tiny downloadable/customizable mini program that can be integrated to capture web data very easily. I don't want to post names of programs and cause you more problems than you already have. Please note, I know this because it relates to my job, not because I like to give you headaches. On another note, I hope we are allowed to view this blog with RSS feeds because thats how I do it.

Anonymous said...

I am a Mac user. I had atwoodknives.com and then later "Available Tools" set as my home page in Firefox so that it would display every time I open a new browser window. It's been a good strategy for me so far, as I've had an opportunity to buy a few tools. I didn't think that was an unfair thing to do, but Peter, I would knock it off if you think that kind of thing might be messing you up.

Peter Atwood said...

I think everything is cool now. Had to do some long overdue maintenance this afternoon and get the newest version of the blogger software. Still a work in progress but it's coming along. :)

Anonymous said...

I'm a twice a day checker, once in the a.m., and once in the p.m. I've seen a few tools pop up recently, that were sold out the first time I saw they were available. Darn. I can understand people's frustrations. What I really hate is to see your tools being resold by people who have no appreciation for your tool, just for the money they'll bring.

I'm glad to hear you'll have some larger runs coming, and look forward to getting a crack at a couple.

Anonymous said...

I wouldn't guess that the culprit is all Mac's but rather a few users. I check your site every time I connect to the Internet. I set my start up page to be the available tool page, on the hopes that I could someday buy a tool. Well, I have never been fast enough to snatch up such a fine tool.

It is easy to write a script that reloads a page on Macs. Then again, that's what RSS is for.

I do hope to someday own one of your perfect tools. Likely, if you ever do a run of the one with the large loop on the end. That to me, would be the perfect tool for my work.

s4biturbo said...

well i just have to say wow, whoa, holy sh!T AND daaaamnnnnnn!

Jeez Peter, i take a couple days off looking and the MSOPT's pop up and the whole site changed.

well at least i see you have more in the works, and great idea to offload the brunt to the blogger site!!

I can't wait to get an affordable SOPTs and other edged tools! big ups peter! nicely done!

Anonymous said...

> Wow. As a Mac user, I had thought so much better of my fellow Mac'ers. I had always figured such treachery was more of a PC thing!

Since when is looking a web page (as much as you want even) treachery?

Seriously, the real problem here is an inadequate hosting solution. Nothing more. Nothing less. I love the tools but making customers jump through hoops to get them, isn't too customer centric is it? I guess if you can afford not to be customer centric business is good. Fortunately (for customers at least) business is not that good for all businesses, but I certainly wouldn't mind have such a gig.

Spencer Marks said...

Interesting. I wonder what % of your paying customers are Mac users vs. PC users.

Anonymous said...

Peter, I've sent this along to you before, but if you're eating up too much bandwidth you should talk to your provider about enabling mod_gzip (or equivalent) on the server. It can cut on down the page size you delivered to your visitors by 80%.

Anonymous said...

Hi Peter,

I just browsed your site (was surprised that the "available tools" and "past work" section are gone) and saw the G3 Prybaby XL. I suppose the wrenchs are imperial. I like the extra bend, this design seems to be one of the most versatile ones yet! Do you got any plans regarding a "metric" version of it?
I understand that you are somehow annoyed about the whole bandwith/ordering system situation. Nevertheless I'd be glad if the "past work" section could make a comeback. I like some of the old designs (esp. the "Tanto goblin" if I recall the name correctly). Any chances that some of this stuff will reappear?

Heads up from Germany

Marc

ps:Hopefully I'm able to order an item this evening, even if I have to stay up longer this night.

Peter Atwood said...

Past work pages will come back as soon as I get a better handle on the bandwidth issues. I shut them down temporarily to conserve bandwidth.