Bigger Boards With Bigger Nails: A Bleg
An anti-spam company thought that it had come up with an ingenious way to combat unsolicited commercial emails:
(Eran) Reshef's Silicon Valley company, Blue Security Inc., simply asked the spammers to stop sending junk e-mail to his clients. But because those sort of requests tend to be ignored, Blue Security took them to a new level: it bombarded the spammers with requests from all 522,000 of its customers at the same time.
But the spammers retaliated. Using tens of thousands of hijacked computers, they launched a furious counter-attack against Blue Security that was so severe, it also affected a number of other sites, including TypePad, the engine behind The Malcontent and many other blogs. (Which would explain the latest behind-the-scenes frustrations experienced by Robbie and me.)
The spammers told Blue Security to cease operations, or it would turn viruses loose on the company's clients. Rather than risk an all-out war, today Blue Security is unilaterally disarming.
Which leads me to the real topic of this post, a "bleg":
A few months ago, I bought an additional 60GB of server space and 1.8TB of monthly bandwidth at DreamHost to handle our video demands. But recently, I have also been preparing to ditch TypePad for a WordPress blog.
DreamHost has "one-click" set-up of WordPress, but of course, it takes a lot more than that, and DreamHost doesn't offer a lot of support in exchange for their cheap rates.
So, if there are any talented Web types out there who enjoy this site and would be willing to donate a little time (or at very low cost), in exchange for whatever publicity of kudos I could give you, I could use help to get up and running. Some of my challenges include exporting our massive archives (and ensuring that all the links work), template and theme design, etc.
I have already put a lot of money into this blog, and what I have gotten in return from TypePad is a lot of downtime, degraded performance of our administrative interface, and a complete lack of support for any sort of innovative features.
So whether you have nuts-and-bolts coding talent or artistic/Web design capability, I would be grateful for any affordable assistance.