Category: What’s new

What a strange topic for my second post!

There is a good reason for it, though. Recently my site, hosted by http://bluehost.com, started getting all silly and just generally giving “this page can’t be displayed” errors about every time I tried to load a page. Usually I could refresh my browser to get the page to load.

In a chat session with a Blue Host rep, I learned that the machine my shared hosting account is hosted on was experiencing a DDoS attack. In short, this is a denial of service attack whereby upset or malicious individuals pelt a machine with so much information, such as log in requests or just about anything as far as I know, and generally cause the server to be overloaded. They explained that this is not an attack on my site personally, but on the machine that my files are stored on.

So the way I see it, someone else who has a shared hosting account with Blue Host stored on the same machine that holds my own site must have ticked somebody off who has the know-how to do this sort of activity. That ticked off (or rather disgustingly bored) entity must be punishing them by launching a DDoS attack on their website’s IP. The problem is, with shared hosting accounts, we all use the same IP address (at least in the case of Blue host).

That said, Blue Host has three different shared hosting plans. I currently use the middle option, which does not include a dedicated IP. The next plan up does, and places your site’s files on a machine with 80 percent fewer other accounts than the plan I use. But, it is 240 dollars a year (according to my reading). They mentioned that I could get a dedicated IP for about 40 dollars a year on top of the cost of my existing plan (which turns out cheaper than the higher plan). They added that the dedicated IP should be a sure way to prevent such attacks from affecting my site again. Unless of course I got attacked directly.

So this is what I did. I’m now 40 dollars poorer, and the DDoS attacks have stopped causing me problems, just like that! How much do you wanna bet the attacks actually stopped right after I spent my money? My luck runs like that. But, ah well, can’t have everything.

Welcome to my new blog!

 

I’ve had one on my site for years, but I never did anything with it. Recently I’ve been having some issues with my web host and that has gotten my interest in the site to increase a bit, given the fact that I’m having to watch out for problems and try to clean up files I no longer need and what ever else. I went to update my ancient version of Word Press, but it just wouldn’t work. So I deleted it and it’s whopping one post and just created a brand new one from scratch.

Only 3 years since the last update on the home page! Stuff changes on the site quite a lot just not on the front page, which is not cool. Anyway, I just fixed a bunch of typos on this particular page of the site. there were a bunch. I can’t believe I allowed myself to put up such a poorly written page. Also, something broke the Twitter timeline I had on here so I removed it completely for now. In other news, I created an application I’m releasing for Christmas to monitor the status of the Dropbox application in windows and speak through the currently running supported Screen Reader that status if it changes, automatically. Here it is (SpeakDropbox)! merry Christmas world!

Moved to valiant8086.com. I’ve been modifying links to point to the pages on the new site and general fixing. Recently I started a podcast with a friend I met on Skype. I may move the mailing list to use the mailing list service provided by my new host. We’ll see. Fixed the twitter what’s been happening thing which was broken when I changed my twitter user name. Added a wiki to the site which is used for just about anything that I want others to be able to help me write.

updating various sections, starting with the games area. It’s been a while since I updated so wanted to add a new news entry and let readers know this site is still being updated from time to time and is not abandoned. Added a twitter area above the new section that shows the last 10 things I’ve said on twitter. I don’t know how visually appropriate it looks at the moment until I get someone to help.

By the way, twitter users can follow me on twitter if they wish, follow valiant1337 or just click the link that says follow me on twitter above.

Moving some stuff around. Friend’s sites and stuff go on the links page now. Community page added, it has instructions about my blog and mailing list. The links page is gonna be a pain right now, it loads up people’s pages in the same frame as the links page, probably making them visually hard to read, and even worse they don’t show up in the address bar so you don’t know what their addresses are so you can go get them later. I know how to fix it and intend to do so soon.

Added a blog. It’s link is:
http://valiant8086.livejournal.com

Also have a mailing list, send a blank message to [email protected] with subscribe in the subject if you want to give it a try. It discusses this website, as well as loosely focuses periodically on general blindness related news on assistive technology and what ever, pretty open to what ever within reason. Try clicking this link to send the message to subscribe, though I doubt it’ll put the subject in, even though I tried to get it to.
Click here to try this

Removed part of the script that told how many people were visiting which stopped working. I’ll look into getting a good replacement later.

Removing a few broken links and generally editing pages

Added 3 new cars to the Topspeed downloads section. Removed the jaws and PACMate links from my side bar because I didn’t have any content for them. Downsized most of the sound files, pages should load faster and Topspeed cars should download quicker.

Removed the music that’s been up here since lord knows when. So don’t expect any theme songs to play right now. Did add a welcoming voice mp3 file, however. Check out my cute little poem over there, it’s really ridiculous, funny, and, go figure, cuuuute.