We’re back up! Sorry for the inconvenience, and thanks for your patience.

What happened? In short, my hosting provider disabled my PyBlosxom CGI script, which runs used to run this site. It was using too much CPU on my server (ambym) for sustained periods of time, due to a combination of comment and referrer spam storms and inefficient plugins, and it was impacting other sites. I may not have liked that they turned me off, but it was only reasonable.

In the short term, I blocked a bunch of spammer IP addresses and optimized the comments and history plugins. In the long term, I’d love to use either FastCGI or WSGI to avoid the cost of starting up the python interpreter, loading all of the modules, and initializing PyBlosxom on every single request. Unfortunately, pair doesn’t support them on shared accounts. Sigh.