I've figured out one of the first steps to getting the scale model to light up as folks browse the website by devising a way to make the server "beep" each time a page is viewed (as opposed to beeping with each "hit" which would include every graphic file, in addition to each php page).

Now I can sit in my living room and hear a subtle "boop" from the basement each time a page is viewed, which seems to be roughly once or twice a second. There are pauses of a few minutes at a time, and sometimes a rapid pattern of sounds. Next step: different tones for different floors. (Got it! plus a different pattern for each floor, too.)

Had to turn off Referrers in the webalizer logs, thanks to spammers. Read about the problem at Kuro5hin.org

I updated the code for the site (no more errors!) and either did something really right, or really wrong, as traffic has dropped from 20,000 hits/day to roughly 6,000 hits/day. Perhaps it has something to do with spidering robots, or with changes to my robots.txt file, or with the httpd.conf changes I made (I was playing with denying access to particular IP addresses - porn referrer-log spammers), or maybe something else?