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.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 2nd, 2009 at 2:43 am and is filed under Administrative. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.