Not very flattering Mr. Flood... not flattering at all.
This is last call for Christmas 2009 limited edition digitalflood.com branded merchandise in the df.com Merch Shop. There is a limited time to purchase all Groucho Claus t-shirts. We’ve already pulled down the Christmas ornaments and with less than 48 hours to go until Christmas this is your last chance to get overnight shipping on any df.com merchandise. After 12/23/09 these items will disappear until 2010 when the next wave is released so if you want them– act now!
Random side note, I’ve added new photos to the following galleries:
None of the photos are “new” per say, but new to df.com itself. You’ll recognize them from our Facebook and MySpace galleries.
Finally you notice we added some images here and there on the site to pretty it up. Nothing major, but just some minor sprucing up to keep things fresh.
Atom Bomb Testing in 1951... yeah those are real troops. Can you say crispy?
You may have noticed we had a major outage to digitalflood.com from around 7 pm EST 12/8/09 into the early morning of 12/9/09 sometime. This was the result of a major spam attack against digitalflood.com. To prevent future attacks of this type against our site, yesterday afternoon I finished migrating email services from the same platform that serves our web page into burlier clustered email server solution. By splitting apart these services and using the web server to only serve web pages (a novel idea indeed) we should no longer see these type of spam attacks “downing” the web site.
While I was at it yesterday (12/9), I also did a whole bunch of OS updates, as well as, some plug in updates to df.com. This is too keep things up to date and secure, as well as, insure top notch delivery of the web site. As a result of all this work, we’re back in business and everything is loading pretty good on the site considering the recent spike in web page viewership. I’m still noticing some anomalies I’m trying to iron out, but ultimately it’s looking like I’m quickly outgrowing my current server. This is admittedly quicker than expected. I cannot complain about df.com being so popular so soon after it’s return– clearly that is a blessing. Therefore my only real long term solution will be to move to a beefier web server and I plan on doing that sometime early in 2010 if all goes right. I may have to “speed up” that new web server deployment though if things continue getting hairy during high volume hours.
Now onto the real bad news, that same night of 12/8/09 of the spam attack my computer’s main hard drive completely failed (it’s a total coincidence– but what bad timing for irony to strike). While I won’t lose any of my music or web cast recordings (including the still in production digitalflood Pirate Radio Vol. 5 Episode 4) it certainly stops production of Pirate Radio for this week. Thus I’m regrettably (but without choice) going to have to move the release of Vol. 5 Ep. 4 into next week. If things change and I somehow get my hard drive replaced/rebuilt faster I’ll let you know right here on df.com, but for the time being– consider this an unexpected week long hiatus in Pirate Radio production.
I’m finding that when it rains– it truly pours. *boom*
Nationals Jersey Spelling Issue - Source: totalprosports.com
Some minor updates to df.com have been implemented, that should help keep things humming along:
I updated the CAPTCHA feature used to post comments. This will add some complexity to the graphic and deter comment spammers from trying to put junk ads on article/posts. I’ve also updated the verbal read out button so if you have trouble reading a particular CAPTCHA output you can click on the little speaker icon and it will read what the letters are (pretty nifty huh?). That feature also helps the vision impaired browse the blog with ease. We try with every effort to make our site accessible to those with special needs and this is just one way we accomplish that.
Updated background caching system, which helps the site load faster.
Also updated the optimization tools I use to help speed up page loads.
All in all these are minor changes, but they keep things humming along well enough to be noted.
Over at the df.com Merch Shop, I’ve added a whole line of kids, toddlers, and infants clothing. This rounds out our offerings for the holiday season. If you haven’t checked out the merchandise, please do. You’re sure to find something for yourself or someone you know who loves our site.
This week’s DF Pirate Radio will be out on 12/5/09 (Volume 5 Episode 3). It will be the infamous and much loved mixtape seasonal bonanza known as “The Beat Feast”. Our previous editions have been very popular with our viewers so with that in mind you’ll be sure to want to download this one as well.
Finally, don’t you hate it when you forget to spell check an email? How about if you forgot to spell check a message that some million people would see? Like say– a Major League Baseball jersey? It happened to the poor Washington Nationals this year back in April 2009. Nobody is quite sure how it happened, but some of the players’ jerseys sported the logo of “NATINALS”. On top of it, they lost the game to the Florida Marlins as well. Can you say “served”?
You would may have checked your Mayan calendar earlier today thinking it might have been 2012. Specifically if you tried to visit df.com between 3 pm EST and 7 pm EST this afternoon. During the course of setting up the new tagged posts feature on df.com, I managed to severely upset my server and proceed to crash it therein taking down df.com for some four hours. I was able to boot the server remotely, but because I hadn’t done that in awhile it ran scan disk and needed some disk errors cleared, which meant I had to physically go to work to actually manually finish the reboot process.
Once I was able to do that things were righted and then I was able over the course of the last hour able to finish tagging up all 247 plus entries on record to date. You’ll notice the “DF.com Hot Topics” box in the left hand menu. The way a tag cloud works (that’s the technical nerd name for that little doodad) is the bigger the font the more it gets read. All you need to do is click on that topic and all the posts that share that tag will come up. Hypothetically those posts are a “hot” thread, but opinions may vary. Let me know what you think of this neat little new feature.
I’ve been getting blitzed with so many hits lately. Couple that with a noticeable increase of spam emails and I’ve noticed page load times slowly creeping up. To temporarily fix the issue (and overall avoid having to deploy a new server) I’ve offloaded email to another server more apt to handle such a task. This will over the course of the next 48 hours significantly improve the situation and bring things back in order. I’m noticing shorter load time improvements already, which is good news for you and me. Yay us!
I came across a rather amusing “Twilight” parody that has landed on YouTube just in time for the “New Moon” release that apparently happened yesterday evening (or so I assume based on the thousand Facebook posts this morning about it and how “wonderful” it is… *gag*).
If you’re as confused as me about the whole Emo gender confused vampire thing as I am then I’m sure you’ll get as good a chuckle out of it as I did. I’ve never been able to sit through “Twilight” or even get through a paragraph of one of the books. It all seems so Harper-Collins dirty novel cheesy to me. I fail to comprehend how making a relationship complex by not only being exceptionally melodramatic, but an outright undead damned soul can be sexy. Alas, I am not woman so you neither hear me roar nor will you have me understand undead fetishes. I think I’m better off either way.
The aforementioned video has been immortalized in the df.com Video channel on YouTube. I also added a few other miscellaneous music videos to the channel as well. Be sure to check those out too.
Finally, I leave you with another Dan web gem. Today he told me about the wondrous “Cats For Gold” program. If there’s something here at df.com we’ve always had trouble with it is too much gold jewelry lying around and just not enough cats. I mean we’re pirates after all and what do pirates have lots of? Gold of course! ARRR! Well, we’re in luck. The Cats For Gold program promises us 25% more cats for our gold than the leading competitors’ programs. The wife may be mad at me, but with a tabby on the way sleeping outside in sub-freezing temperatures won’t quite feel as bad!
