FCPS: It’s Illegal To Make Websites!

Posted in Internet, Real World

Yeah, yeah. I make websites. Once upon a time, I ran a huge network of over 50 proxy websites. They were cool and all, but eventually they absorbed a ton of server usage and, since there really wasn’t much of a ROI given that I couldn’t find an ad network that could fulfill the “should-be-doing-work-rather-than-browsing-blocked-websites” demographic, I wasn’t making sufficient money. The CTR with Adsense was hopeless, not to mention that each proxy, one by one, started getting blocked by the big guys. By ‘big guys’ I mean Websense and rest of the shit ton of “Network Security” softwares. So there really was no light at the end of the tunnel, and I shut them all down.

Anyways, just a few weeks ago, I made a new proxy. A private proxy, nothing of commercial value, but one that I, along with a small group of friends, would personally use. It was called “Afnani’s Moo Proxy”, and was located at robertafnani.com/moo/ (now offline, but if you really care you can check it out at robertafnani.com/mooold/).

Before long, a lot of people in my school, and even other schools in the area caught wind of it, and basically everyone at Langley HS started using it. How could I tell, you ask? Well, it’s kinda obvious with Awstats shows only a few unique IP addresses accessing the site, yet a shit ton of pageloads and gigabytes upon gigabytes of bandwidth usage. Great. I made a proxy on my domain name and now its the shit everyone’s talking about. I must be a badass now.

This is when everything starts to go raw. Just the other day, I was pulled into an administrator’s office (whose name shall be undisclosed), and slapped in the face with a possible suspension. I am accused of violating my rights as a student, and intentionally attempting to disturb the learning environment of students in my school.

I was accused of breaking the law. Of providing a means for students to do illegal activities in school. And I got all the blame. Supposedly, if students were reading instructions, and I quote, on “how to make a bomb”, I’m the one who should be facing criminal prosecution, as I’m the one who provided all the means for retrieving the information.

Of course, I tried to argue my way out of it. Proxies are perfectly legal to create. I can do whatever the hell I want outside of school, especially if it involves my job, which takes part mostly on the Internet.

Much to my dismay, however, apparently I have no rights at FCPS schools. I asked the administrator and the tech guy (who, if I may add, is a great guy, and not the one at fault here) to point out on the Student Network Access Agreement what policy/rule I violated. They refused to, because there was no law that made what I did ‘illegal’. I wasn’t hacking the network, I wasn’t dickin’ around with the hardware; I made a damn website, and no where on the entire agreement does it say anything about not being able to make websites outside of school.

Being the one with lower hand, I had to submit to their will, so as to not get into any more trouble. In the end, my computer account at school was banned, but the verbal abuse and harassment to me was worse. Hell, I was pulled out of class during my final exam for the first semester of Philosophy, so who knows what grade I’m going to be getting on that test. And I was facing a possible suspension from the school premises for doing this.

I’m the little man in this situation: my school thinks they have all the power in the world, and there’s nothing I can do about it. I am now forced to take all my proxies offline, otherwise I face “repeat network abuse” and will get in a LOT of trouble (recommendation for expulsion, anyone?).

Langley High School has no right to do this. Suppose “robertafnani.com” wasn’t the domain for this proxy. I’m damn sure the IT guys wouldn’t WHOIS the proxy and attempt to arrest/accuse the owner of commiting a crime. I feel as though I am discriminated against, and that my school’s actions against me were unjust. They’re abusing their power and if I can’t get any help from the press, then there’s no stopping this administration.

Worst part is that now I’m tagged as being a ‘computer hacker’ and a ‘potential threat’ to the school system. A mass email was sent out from the administrator who accused me of this to all the teachers, administrators, librarians, etc in the entire school, which basically says I’m a criminal and I need to be watched when getting within a 10-foot radius of a computer.

I find it unfair that Fairfax County Public Schools feels they can impose this kind of totalitarianism on me, I’m now a criminal for making proxies. For making a website. A legal website. On my private server. Outside of school. Great.

God help me.

Digg: http://digg.com/people/High_School_It_s_ILLEGAL_To_Make_Websites

Read more...

Keep Your Readers Coming Back

Posted in Internet

They say content is king. So it is, if you’re looking for search engine traffic. Linkbacks are supposedly just as important, but, once again, are good only for search engine traffic and a pocket full of visitors. Gathering traffic is not hard, hell, I could easily just buy traffic, but keeping users interested in your site or blog can be quite tough. Here are a few tips on how to do just that:

Interactivity - make sure to enable systems which allow viewers to respond to your content. For a blog or news website, a simple comments section can introduce a great deal of attachment between the viewer and your site. More often than not, a viewer who comments will return to see who else responds to their comments. Should someone have responded to their comment, there’s an even greater chance that same visitor will return for future discussion.

Don’t offer the same old frontend - many a times have I personally fell into this trap. By offering an open source CMS-based, run off the mill design and site, you open up doors which may lead to trouble in the future. Disgruntled users in search for power may grab your trade secrets and open up a site of their own, using your valuable past experiences, and even steal your own members. Also, it’s easier to hack and/or abuse a site which is built off a familiar system/design, then one that is exclusive. Furthermore, a competing site may use the same essential design, which destroys your capability to attain brand-ability and uniqueness on the web.

Controversy is king - I’m not saying you should become like Elliot Carver in the James Bond movie “Tomorrow Never Dies”, but you should definitely try to spice up your news. Catchy titles and entertaining content not only satisfy the news-hungry, but also enhance discussion and seriously bring users back. A site with strong news will have an even stronger community.

Don’t make your site look dead, or too alive - this one is a serious killer for starters, especially sites which focus around forums. Do not excessively post in your own forums. Do not have back-and-forth conversations with one or two members in your forum’s threads, a forum is for thoughtful discussion, not a casual conversation; we don’t need to know about your plans for the night with another member. Do not have more than a one or two administrators/moderators (especially in the beginning). Do not boost the cookie timeout for your forum’s “who’’s online” table or register fake accounts to make it look like there are more users than there really are on your site. Eventually, new members will catch on to that fact and will feel cheated, and leave. Focus on adding quality content to the non-forums part of the site and people will come, in time.

Unique news is good news - ensuring the exclusivity of your news/blog posts will directly affect the return rate of your visitors. If there are bigger, better sites covering your niche already, it’s going to be extremely tough to penetrate the market and advance in both search engines and in reality. Posting a piece of news even a few hours late is too late to be considered “news”. Unless it’s hot off the press, or made in-house, people will have no reason to stick around, unless they are your personal friends. Writing articles, reviews, and interviews can be a great way to build content that will keep users busy until you can get your act together with the news.

Keep your server running fast - I have read somewhere that most Internet users tend to stick away from sites that take more than 4 seconds to load. Though with external banner advertisements, that may be quite hard to achieve on your site (especially if it relies off a database/CPU intensive CMS), it would be a good idea to frequently check out the health of your server, specifically if it is a dedicated server. Try to keep the CPU usage at any given time under 5.00 (with 0.00-1.00 being your main target), and make sure you have more than 30% of your server’s physical RAM free. Investing in your server is investing in the future, as your site grows, so will your site’s processing needs.

With the onset of Web 2.0+ (how I like to call it), it’s important to make your site an environment for users to think for themselves and share their feelings, and maintain a high standard of functionality so readers don’t go elsewhere for their Internet reading.

Read more...