TarsTarkas.NET Blog

So this site called Nmap made a graph of the 300,000 or so most popular websites using their favicons (those little pictures up in the web browser address area for those of you wondering) and then sized them by popularity. Blah, blah, Google’s the biggest, but the important thing is TarsTarkas.NET’s favicon is there! That’s right, some site we’ve never heard of used our badly compressed favicon to make an art project! JEALOUS??? Of course you are!

A large-scale scan of the top million web sites (per Alexa traffic data) was performed in early 2010 using the Nmap Security Scanner and its scripting engine.

We retrieved each site’s icon by first parsing the HTML for a link tag and then falling back to /favicon.ico if that failed. 328,427 unique icons were collected, of which 288,945 were proper images. The remaining 39,482 were error strings and other non-image files. Our original goal was just to improve our http-favicon.nse script, but we had enough fun browsing so many icons that we used them to create the visualization below.

The area of each icon is proportional to the sum of the reach of all sites using that icon. When both a bare domain name and its “www.” counterpart used the same icon, only one of them was counted. The smallest icons–those corresponding to sites with approximately 0.0001% reach–are scaled to 16×16 pixels. The largest icon (Google) is 11,936 x 11,936 pixels, and the whole diagram is 37,440 x 37,440. Since your web browser would choke on that, we have created the interactive viewer below (click and drag to pan, double-click to zoom, or type in a site name to go right to it).

http://tarstarkas.net 10000 bytes in 0.00 seconds.
http://tarstarkas.net/favicon.ico 1406 bytes in 0.01 seconds.

Online lookup : The icon is at (16.760, 16.653) and is 32 × 32 pixels.

Popularity: 1% [?]

The new review is Makin, a Thai softcore vampire film that is cheaper than a McDonalds minimeal and leaves you less satisfied. In fact, a McDonalds minimeal sounds pretty good right now, except for the fact that McDonalds is outside and I am lazy. So I guess I’ll eat this salad we have at home. Needs more Russian dressing…

Oh, Makin sucks, but at least we got lots of photos and a movie clip! Read it today! And bring by some McNuggets if you’re stopping by…too lazy to go to out!

Popularity: 1% [?]

That’s six years ago today that we first showed up on the internet with an awful review of Robo Vampire and have since become a place with reviews that are not quite as bad. One of the good things about switching from Mambo to WordPress and having to go into every article is I get to look over some of my older work, parts of which I hadn’t looked at in years. A lot of it is not as bad as I thought it was, but there are still misspellings all over the place, sentences that go nowhere, and summaries that miss important things like the plot. In the six years we’ve spawned a blog which has taken on a life of its own and a spinoff site that grew out of the blog, so in a way, TarsTarkas.NET is a media empire. And even though we’re in a state of transition as I finish up moving the reviews and Battle Beast articles into their own categories (there are almost 350 reviews) we have plenty more coming! So look out, more movie crap will be headed your way! MuHAHAHAHAHA!!!

Popularity: 1% [?]

What it is is we updated the main site from Mambo to WordPress! Now we’re using a front end program that’s actually been updated in the past two years! Thanks to the magic of transferring all the articles over, I now have to manually enter each article, fix one or two things (such as the movie clip code), add tags, add categories, and fix all internal links! That should only take me another month or so, then I can focus on improving the current theme and figure out a way to unite the blog and the main site while making them distinct as well. At least I don’t have to manually republish every article. TarsTarkas.NET turns six in a few days, so a fresh facelift is just what the doctor ordered.

Popularity: 1% [?]

The new review is Beauty’s Evil Roses, Hong Kong goes crazy witch lady S&M lesbian tentacle mind control action. Like usual. With plenty of pictures and a clip, read it today!

Also we’ll probably be biting the big one and switching over from Mambo to WordPress on the main site. Largely due to Mambo being practically dead and me using WordPress for everything else. Granted, that means I lose all of my six years of links and all internal links, plus there is the fear that I’ll lose actual data. So I get to back up everything and have fun playing conversion. So expect that in a month or so, just in time for the 6th Anniversary of TarsTarkas.NET.

Popularity: 1% [?]