Gone in Sixty Seconds (DOG EAR)
Gone in Sixty Seconds (DOG EAR)
’ve had service interruptions on the site before. From time to time my Amazon links suddenly stop working. I’ll notice that instead of profit-generating links to my books, I’ll end up with generic orange-box links to Amazon-in-general. Usually in an hour, maybe a half-day, the links return.
So last Thursday when I found my site replaced by a 500 internal error page, I figured GoDaddy was at fault. There was also a chance that our information security people here at work had gotten even more draconian and had deemed my home site a threat. Decided to wait it out and see.
By COB, the site was still not visible. Rode the bike home with hauntings of concern and checked (even before showering – that’s how concerned I was). Still 500-ing. Uh oh. This removed all thoughts of interference by work security. So I called GoDaddy proper.
The woman tech I got was nice enough. No service interruptions on their part, no. But let me look into something… I’m going to put you on hold… the Girl from Enchilada goes walking… okay, I’m going to have you try something…
In the end, all I got from them was the statement that “I must have broken my site” (I hadn’t done anything for days, and it had been up all week) and a link to the Joomla discussion board. Hey, thanks for that. So I had a dead page and nothing to show for it.
Sent out a feeler email to the guy who’d helped me years ago, to see if I could rub the lamp and make that particularly-helpful genie reappear. And I spend the day Friday oddly considering my site.
Sure, I liked it. A lot of people chat about my model train blogs and people have read (and enjoyed) the books I’ve recommended. Have even had writers reach out to me (usually positively) about reviews I’ve posted. Overall, blogging on writing, reading, Go, my trips, my interests has been rewarding. But what could I replace it with?
Friday I asked about – what web tools did people recommend? And what would my site look like? Were there things I could do better? And worse? How could I lay it out to be more attractive. Overall, I was surprised at my levelness on this, that I wasn’t in a panic, just accepting.
Got home Friday and decided to check Facebook for the usual political-meme-tossing that it has become. Of course, I’d have to go through my dead site page (which was my homepage). Maybe I’d change that until I could figure something out. Firefoxed in and…
There was my site!
All back! All restored! Pictures of me! Trip reports, book reports, train reports, all nice and clean.
Well.
So clearly GoDaddy had had a disruption of service and had eventually rebooted my server. Perhaps enough people had complained. Perhaps it had just been routine. Either way, the site was back.
Going forward, I am going to make some small changes, like getting my books on the front page, little cosmetic stuff. But for now, I’m just happy that I’m back on the web.
And what’s this got to do with writing? I ask myself that every time something like this happens.