Today’s earlier downtime was due to a DDoS attack against the data center that dwnomad is hosted on. To help minimize the vulnerability the hosting company is doing some upgrades this evening that is causing some additional spotty availability.

UPDATE – As of 10:55 PM MDT they are about to get started on the changes.

While they’re making changes to avoid future problems on their end, I’m also making changes to help minimize some of the risk on mine. This is through the use of a service called CloudFlare that stores cached copies of the site distributed across several locations in the cloud, thus if the server its actually hosted on is down, the blog would still be accessible for visitors. Unfortunately I would still not be able to post anything if the server is down. Hopefully I’ll be able to get it all configured tomorrow.

Us in 90 Seconds from CloudFlare on Vimeo.

Additionally, there’s an unrelated bug that I’ve encountered once before that is afflicting Wesley’s article from today. When I encountered it before I thought it just had to do with the frames around the pictures I was embedding and I got around it by using a more compact media gallery, but Wesley didn’t have any pictures. What’s interesting is that it’s different on different browsers and operating systems I’ve tested it on. So you may or may not have noticed it.

I have modified the formating a little and discovered the problem only occurs when a post is too long. In this case Wesley had over 1100 words, when I encountered it before it was because of too many large pictures. It appears to be a frame for one of the sidebar widgets that bleeds into the main article and it seems to be the last or nearly the last thing on the page to load. I’ll be playing around with the sidebar some tomorrow (I have the day off) and if I can’t correct it, I’ll file a bug report.

UPDATE 04/14/12 11:14 AM MDT – The bug was an issue with the “Share This” plugin’s Facebook “like” button. I’ve turned it off and the problem is resolved.