More MetaBlog. More on problems of living with free service
Like I had feared, there are still lot of people who are using Netscape 4.7x browsers in this world. I can't blame them, even I was using it for long time after it was assumed to be extinct. My site uses iframe tags to retrieve images stored in Yahoo geocities. Since they don't allow linking to images from external sites(blogspot), I had to wrap the images in html pages and embed those pages here using iframe tags. But unfortunately Netscape 4.7 series browsers do not support iframes and all you see is a blank line instead of an image. Today, I got a mail from this new visitor complaining that he is not able to see any of the images in his Netscape browser. All that I could do was to give this person the URLs where the images are stored so that they can be viewed directly without any problem of iframes. I did not dare to recommend using IE(like many fools had recommended me earlier only to annoy me furthur), I even suspect the visitor uses a Unix box.
For the first time ever(at least as far as I know) my geocities home page reached a data retrieval rate that exceeded the limits set by them. Hence, when I loaded my posts to start writing this post, in the place of all images here, I saw an error saying "Yahoo! Geocities: The web site you are trying to access has exceeded its allocated data transfer. Visit our help area for more information". Indeed, I did visit the help pages to see more details, since I did not know so far that they had an upper limit set. They seemed to talk a lot of nonsense on the page but never mention what is the maximum transfer rate permitted. Fortunately, the downtime is limited to just one hour and not a day as I had suspected initially. It is likely that someone was looking at all the images in my site, and it is really easy to cross the transfer rate with so many fat images stored in the site. But still, somehow I am still not able to convinve myself to move to a paid hosting service.
