Author: James McNally

DDOS!

As if updating my blogging software wasn’t enough of a hassle, it turns out that for most of today, my site was unreachable. It was the bad hangover of what looks to have been a Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) attack. Wow, that makes me feel kind of important. Over the weekend, some malicious freaks hit my site over 100,000 times. These were page views, but the number of unique visitors was suspiciously low. The weird thing is that I had no trouble viewing the site until this morning, when the attack seemed to be over.

If you had trouble getting the site to load today, I apologize. And I’m glad you’re reading this now. No, not you, malicious freaks. You guys can go away and not come back. kthxbye.

Freshened Up

Well, a few hours of updating, uploading and customizing later, I have a freshly upgraded copy of WordPress 2.5 running Consolation Champs. I had to also update my current theme, Cutline, and then re-add all my customized header images, which also needed to be resized. So, these things never go as smoothly as advertised. A few familiar things are looking unfamiliar, but overall, it was fairly painless. Let me know if anything looks strange to you (other than the strange header images, which are strange all the time).

Disqus: Discuss

I’m trying out a new commenting system for a little while. Disqus is an external commenting system, but before you start screaming, it’s not another Haloscan. Disqus actually integrates pretty well with blog entries but what it promises is to free comments from the pages they’re on and weave them into a fuller conversation. I’ve been frustrated trying to follow all the places I’ve made comments to try to keep contributing to those conversations, and perhaps a solution like Disqus can help. On their site, each commenter has a dedicated Dashboard where I can see all comments made on my blog(s) and all comments I’ve made. I’ve only had this thing installed for an hour so obviously I can’t say how I like it in practice, but I hope you’ll jump in here and comment so I can see how it works. Do you have any experience with Disqus? What do you think of the current state of blog comment systems? Do they meet your needs?

Find the Lost Ring

Ok, I’ve been back from SXSW since yesterday afternoon, but I’m not quite ready to do the full writeup just yet. In fact, I’m extremely distracted right now. At Jane McGonigal’s amazing keynote last Tuesday, she pointed to a new ARG (alternate reality game) that she’d been working on for the upcoming Beijing Olympics. I’m a HUGE Olympics junkie and the trailer she showed just knocked my socks off. So now, I’m immersed in the mystery of The Lost Ring. This isn’t the sort of thing one person can figure out on their own, so if you decide to try to figure it out, jump into the comments here and let’s join forces.

P.S. One of my favourite things about the game so far is the extensive use of Esperanto, the “world language” that hardly anyone speaks. It’s tied into the hopeless optimism of the Olympic movement, and that gets me all choked up, but it’s also supremely geeky.

SXSW 2008: Social Networking Indeed

I’m here in Austin for my eighth consecutive South by Southwest Interactive conference. I’ve come to look at this week as an essential creative reboot each year. The weather in Toronto combined with the months of near darkness always leave me drained in inspiration. And then I come to Texas and spend a week with a few thousand of my closest friends.

I didn’t plan well this year. And work got crazy. And I foolishly solicited SXSW filmmakers to send me screeners. So the leadup to this year’s conference was a flurry of late nights and trying to compile a super-calendar of Interactive, Film and Music events. Now that I’m here, it’s clear that I just can’t do it all.

In fact, my normal “shy extravert” personality has taken a hit and I am finding myself cocooning in my hotel room, which is unusual for me. I think part of it might be that I’m a bit nervous about trying to meet new people (ie. Film people). On the one hand, I’m a lazy man and don’t mind hanging around with my old Interactive tribe. But I feel like I might be missing an opportunity to learn something new and talk about another of my favourite things with like-minded people. But I’m also afraid of being embraced by the Film people and then missing out on all the stuff I’ve come to love about the Interactive conference. This conflict over different social choices as well as scheduling options has left me even more paralyzed than usual. And I don’t like feeling like this.

I’m hoping that staying a few days extra to see free Music day shows and hang around with my Austin pals will sort me out. I’ll post an update in a few days.