alternative ways to connect to the steemit blockchain when steemit.com is down!

well it seems that steemit has had a bunch of website down issues since I’ve been to sleep, I knew it was kinda bad when I went to another few of the sites in this list and they were down too. I’m presuming it’s some lame script kiddy attack on the network in some way, it’s certainly an area that steemit really need to start looking at in a round robin and maybe even cloud flare kinda way, I’m expecting it to be some dumb ass ddos attack or maybe it’s just some of the edge network servers playing up, I think they use amazon to scale into, maybe it’s time to start looking at multiple clouds — it was doing so well at well, the service seemed faster than ever recently with some of those frontend changes.

so what other ways can you connect to steemit when the main website is down?

Well, two that I always check are busy (like facebook style) and chainbb (more of a forum style) these both connect to the steemit blockchain, that’s what makes the platform actually really awesome that it’s not dependant on just one website, many websites actually connect in to the steemit blockchain which is fairly decentralised across many servers across the planet, it still needs many more servers of course and probably some better, higher level protection but so far in the eight months I’ve been using the platform it’s been pretty darn solid most of the time — nobody likes downtime but it’s a fact of internet life plus, it actually helped me write out this post rather than read too many things this morning.

always use a markdown editor offline

You’ll never know when a website will go down so never ever, ever ever, start writing in a text box or form on a website with the expectation that it will takes care of your post and not lose it. ever. Like, we have all done it, wrote an epic post, spent ages on it, hit submit and nothing, refreshed, gone. That moment of frustration and anger at the platform for losing our epic blog post. Truth is, it’s not a good practice to get into, we take the internet and posting to sites pretty much for granted, we expect them to just work, we expect the cloud ‘to just work’ — the golden run for blogging and computing in general, have redundancy and backups.

Backups of your machine, backups of your tools, backed up into the cloud, offline drafts that you can copy and paste later, macros in other programs and if possible automate that so it’s in three independent locations (especially the backups - trust me on that) across the web, that way you can minimise the downtime and frustration, heck you actually might end up being more productive because you are saving yourself all that frustration time by being more pro active about your blogging.

Looks like steemit is back for the moment, I expect it will be up and down all day, I hope these additional sites make your steemit experience a little better when things go a little strange! :)

p.s - i understand the irony that the steemit site would actually need to be up for you to read this post, i'm hoping that you get to see this post and make a note in your new shiny markdown editor the additional sites to connect from! :)

Cheers,
TeamHumble X