myWhitehaven video has been launched today on Facebook - now you can share your video clips of the town with ease. Here's the link - please join the group and tell your friends to join in too: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=277317172398

The weather forecaster on our news and weather page has been updated with a tool from the Met Office - now you can check out a five day weather forecast for Whitehaven - you can also look at temperature, rainfall and pressure maps. in addition to these features, if a weather warning is issued by the Met Office, it will be visible on the weather forecaster.

Please be sure to bookmark the page so that you are kept fully informed of the weather!

As you may know - myWhitehaven.net is the publisher of a small number of toolbars.

A number of the components from our toolbars were recently submitted to the Conduit Awards - a shortlist has been drawn up, and we are pleased to be able to announce that we have made it to the Conduit Awards finals. We are really proud to have made it this far.

Can you help us go further? Your vote for us in the finals is a vote of confidence in what we are doing. It would really mean a lot to us if we made it all the way to the finish line in December. Please VOTE NOW, and ask your friends to vote too.

We have SIX components that have made it through to the finals, so please visit each category to register your vote. THANKS!!

What are the Conduit Awards?
The Conduit Awards is a competition that honours the creative development of components and applications that can be shared in the Conduit Marketplace. These 'gadgets' are available to more than 200,000 toolbar publishers and more than 60 million users.

The Conduit Awards began on November 1st - thousands of toolbar publishers pushed forward their entries to the competition - the list of components was reviewed and reduced to 64 items in eight categories.

From now, until the 5th December, you as a toolbar user can contribute to the final outcome - you can help decide who the overall winner is of the Conduit Awards, 2009.

To help us in the competition, please click the Vote Now button - when the voting page has loaded, please click the Vote Now button again.

As with previous years, we have made available to you for free, a downloadable calendar for 2010.
The photograph on the calendar is of the beautiful gardens at St. Nicholas Church.

If you are interested in downloading our calendar, please click here.
Feel free to share it with your family and friends.

I have now put online a description of Whitehavens Male Voice Choir - many thanks to Graeme for his help. The article gives a description of the group and their achievements. In addition to reading about the skilled choristers, you can also listen to them singing at one of their concerts.

To read more (and listen) please click here.
Don't forget to visit Whitehaven Male Voice Choir at their website: http://www.wmvc.co.uk/

Over the weekend of 25-27 June, 2010 the Whitehaven Festival will take place.

The festival plans were unveiled after organisers were given a major books with a £100,000 sponsorship from Nuclear Management Partners.

The festival for 2010 includes a major Veterans’ Parade through Whitehaven to mark Armed Forces Day on June 27.

Graham Campbell, NMP’s general manager in Cumbria, said the company was delighted to be involved with the festival once again. “NMP has pledged to play a major role in the community in West Cumbria and this is further evidence of us doing so. We have already announced funding of up to £20million over the next five years to be aligned with the Energy Coast Masterplan, together with £500,000 a year to support groups and individuals through the Cumbria Community Foundation.

“Our support for the masterplan is through West Cumbria Vision and I am delighted to be able to provide funding from that to ensure that the Festival, which was such an outstanding success this year, will take place again.”

Brian Wilson, chairman of West Cumbria Vision, handed over the cheque to the Festival Company in a ceremony on Whitehaven Harbour this afternoon. He said: “The Whitehaven Festival proved to be a treat showcase for the town last year and the support of the nuclear funding partners is important to the success of West Cumbria Vision. Now that we are fully operational, I look forward to developing a range of exciting opportunities in the community through West Cumbria Vision.”

MP Jamie Reed said: “This sponsorship is great news for the area. Not only does it show that local industry recognises and values the efforts of the festival team, it shows that NMP really does have its heart in the local community. The fact that this sponsorship is allowing the team to confirm their plans for next June makes it a double bonus for the area – the festival weekend will be a massive boost to the local economy and the Veterans’ Parade on Armed Forces Day will give us all the opportunity to pay a fitting tribute to the work of the armed forces past and present.”

To keep in touch with all the latest Festival news, please bookmark myWhitehaven.net

The following is a copy of an announcement made by my hosting company - I hope that it will help you understand the background to the recent hosting problems that we experienced, and the actions that they have taken to prevent an attack of a similar nature occuring again:

As you may know, starting on Saturday, September 26th at 3:30am (U.S.A. PST), we were hit with a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. This type of attack harnesses thousands of computers around the world to simultaneously overload our servers with requests, preventing legitimate requests from getting through. You may have recently read about similar attacks against Twitter, bringing them offline for multiple days.

We fought to bring back the service throughout the night, and were able to bring back sites hosted on a subdomain. The attack stopped at 3pm on Saturday, and everything returned to normal. Unfortunately, intensified attacks resumed at 3:30am Sunday morning. This time, we were ready and were again able to keep everything running except sites on their own domain.

The attacks stopped again at 3pm, and the pattern repeated on both Monday and Tuesday mornings. By Monday, we were able to move all users who had purchased a domain through to a different IP, so that they were not affected. Users who owned their own domains and brought them independently continued to be affected.

We worked frantically throughout these days to secure dedicated hardware to protect against these attacks. Finally, by the scheduled attack time on Wednesday morning, we had configured very powerful (and very expensive) hardware that was capable of completely mitigating the attack. Service has been fully functional for all users since 3pm PST on Tuesday.

Due to the nature of the attacks, we're not able to easily tell who is responsible, although we're actively working with the FBI to investigate further. What we do know is that we have now made a considerable investment to be in a much better position to defend against such attacks in the future.

The myWhitehaven.net online store has been launched!

The store is powered by Amazon.co.uk and contains a small number of products that may be of interest to visitors and locals alike. Please browse the store.

On check out, you will be transferred to a secure server at Amazon.co.uk.

Over the past few days, myWhitehaven.net has been inaccessable (our forum has been unaffected). This has been due to a severe DDOS (Denial of Service) attack upon the servers of the hosting company that the site resides with. We are sorry for any inconvenience that this may have caused you.

The very latest information from my site host is:
We are under a heavy DDOS attack, some sites are intermittently unavailable.
We are working hard to mitigate the effects and restore service.

What is a DDOS attack?
A denial-of-service attack (DoS attack) or distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS attack) is an attempt to make a computer resource unavailable to its intended users. Although the means to carry out, motives for, and targets of a DoS attack may vary, it generally consists of the concerted efforts of a person or people to prevent an Internet site or service from functioning efficiently or at all, temporarily or indefinitely. Perpetrators of DoS attacks typically target sites or services hosted on high-profile web servers such as banks, credit card payment gateways, and even root nameservers.

One common method of attack involves saturating the target (victim) machine with external communications requests, such that it cannot respond to legitimate traffic, or responds so slowly as to be rendered effectively unavailable. In general terms, DoS attacks are implemented by either forcing the targeted computer(s) to reset, or consuming its resources so that it can no longer provide its intended service or obstructing the communication media between the intended users and the victim so that they can no longer communicate adequately.

For more in-depth information on a DDOS check out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denial-of-service_attack

Following consultation with members of the myWhitehaven forum, the design of the site has been updated. I would like to thank everyone that contributed in choosing the design, and I have to admit that I am very pleased with the outcome. THANKS!

Please note that due to the new, wider design some reformatting of pages will be required.
This will take place over the next few weeks.

If you have any suggestions, or comments about myWhitehaven.net please get in touch.