Archive for the ‘Administrative’ Category

Site Down — Note Changes

Wednesday, September 2nd, 2009

Site has been down for the past few hours because my poor little shared server can’t handle the slashdot traffic that has recently been pointed at my article on H1N1. On the one hand, I don’t have ads on this blog; on the other hand, it means I can’t afford a server strong enough to handle the occasional slashdot DoS.

I have reconfigured the permalinks and caching behavior in an attempt to bring it back up. If you encounter broken links to this site or if you observe strange behavior, I’d appreciate a note here as to what you are seeing. My impression is that this caching plugin causes the pages to look a little bit nasty at first when you load them when the server is under load, and eventually they get a bit prettier with all the images and backgrounds when things lighten up, but I could be wrong.

Thanks for your patience!

Update: post backlog limited to 5 posts and images removed from the latest name that wares to try and keep server load down. Will restore normal reading settings once the slashdot attack is over.

Update #2 (9/3): I thought the traffic would be down by now but my ISP is still recommending I keep the blog in lock-down with “ugly” pages and no images otherwise they might have to pull the plug again. I’m not particularly fond of tinkering around with the mechanics of wordpress, php and mySQL so I’m just going to hunker down and weather the storm for another couple of days.

Update #3 (9/5): Looks like traffic is down, I’m gradually re-enabling features of the blog. Hopefully, now if you see the blog it should look “pretty” i.e., the header is loading properly and the CSS is being served. I will try turning on images on the front page tomorrow if things are still going well. Thanks for your continued patience.

Update #4 (9/8): I think everything is back to normal after the holiday. Hi-res images should be back now. If you do see anything amiss, please do report it. The backlog of posts shown on the front page is trimmed to 5 instead of the usual 10.

Blog Upgraded

Monday, April 6th, 2009

Well, I’ve upgraded to the latest WordPress, cleaned up some spam and gave the database a once-over. Hopefully the annoying spam comments are gone for everybody.

Looks like everything made it through the upgrade okay, but if you see something amiss (in particular with how comments are processed) please let me know. Sorry about the disruption, and thanks to everyone who called the problem to my attention. Since I don’t check my blog with an RSS reader I probably would never have seen those hidden links…

Blog Compromised

Sunday, April 5th, 2009

Sorry about the ads that some of you are seeing on RSS feeds. It looks like over this weekend a script leveraged a vulnerability in WordPress to promote a draft post (hence the broken video), attach a bunch of ads to it, and publish it. I’ve demoted the post with all the ads but I’m still getting emails from readers that use RSS saying that they see ads appended to their feeds, so perhaps the hack has modified some of the core scripts for syndicating RSS feeds. I probably have to wipe and re-install wordpress to remove this problem, and probably manually edit the database as well, which will take some time…which seeing as I’m already late on posting last month’s Name that Ware you can tell I’m not having a lot of time these days. Thanks for your patience…

In the meantime, if someone can confirm that their RSS reader is still seeing ads in-line with content after this post is up, I’d appreciate it.

RSS Issues?

Sunday, March 9th, 2008

I got a note today from a reader that my WordPress blog’s RSS feed outputs XML with invalid syntax. I’ve been unable to reproduce this bug; has anyone else encountered this?

Site Having Troubles

Friday, July 13th, 2007

If you can read this message, congratulations! You got to my server.

Due to the massive onslaught of traffic today, my server is having troubles. I apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

Also, for readers who arrived via the front page, the blog series “Made in China” is a set of several posts, so please do scroll down to read the first in the series. Blogs have this funny time-reversal thing going on with them so it’s awkard for readers joining a themed miniseries mid-stream.