The game resumes
Over the course of this weekend, my latest pet project MetaHypem has been shut down but by HypeMachine and not through us. HypeMachine seems to have added either our domain or instance running our server onto a black-list.
Here is a nice screen capture of what current data HypeMachine is returning my scraper. The MP3 Artist/Title was a friendly sting I guess.
I haven't done much publicizing of the server and daily hits to the site was only ~40 visitors (most returning). However clearly there was a need/love for having access to the music (~50k downloads). All the blogs that HypeMachine scrapes allow users to download the music. The purpose of a music blog is to help promote bands and new music. Keeping the music locked onto their platform seems going against their goal.
Where to go from here
I'm currently investigating (alongside my partner) different ways to resolve this issue. I'd love feedback from people expressing perhaps which they would prefer or even have experience with!
- Move the server to EC2. Perhaps they only block the IP at which I can just tear down the server to get a new IP.
- Change the scraping of HypeMachine to be distributed and have other instances perform the scraping.
- Release the source code to the project and let others run local instances.
- Figure out other inventive ways!
