Too Serious.
Anything that requires many minutes of uploading into some mysterious folder at one's ISP is fraught with peril and frustration. I read the comments left by my thoughtful readers yesterday re: my re-do of the website and, fresh from a relaxing father's day, I hit the studio this morning to make some tweaks. Most involved just removing duplicate files, changing the automatic slide show timing for the galleries and making the thumbnails in the galleries one size bigger.
Then, unexpectedly, all hell broke loose. I tried to publish to my site from the design program only to have the program crash again and again. I tried to save the files to disk but would get 90% of the way there before the program crashed again. I tried uploading what I thought was a completed save to the ISP only to see that major parts and pieces are missing and now the site is a catastrophe. A meteor crater of programming.
It will, no doubt, be during this time period that the senior art director for Apple will decide to take a peek at my site as a prelude to offering me an exten$ive project.... And then J.J. Abrams will drop by to see more about that great novelist he's heard so much about (all fantasy).
I may have fixed the issue. I'm trying another upload now but, as with all things modern, I am very doubtful, pessimistic.
Well, at least I'll have the memory of having once had a mostly completed site up for a while....
edit: Hmmmm. It's wrong to always presume that we've done something wrong when it comes to computers, ISPs, web sites, web hosts, et al. Today I re-loaded application software, changed security protocols for uploads, cleared caches, cleared folders on the web server and all kinds of other stupid voodoo only to finally talk to a human at our hosting company and finding out that they did a huge server upgrade over the weekend that played havoc on their firewall settings. It got resolved around noon and I found out about it just a few minutes ago at 3:42 CST.
We are now in the last throes of yet another upload to the kirktuck.com server and everything that I've been spot-checking looks pretty good. On days like this I re-decide that my hatred for technology is not misguided. Happy only for air conditioning, and cures for polio, tuberculosis and other assorted diseases; as well as refrigeration and Fed Ex delivery from Amazon.com. Every other advance largely proves to be more trouble that it is worth and comes with unexpected consequences. But, for the moment, it looks like I'll have my new website back. Pretty happy since I dropped days into construction. Whew.
We are now in the last throes of yet another upload to the kirktuck.com server and everything that I've been spot-checking looks pretty good. On days like this I re-decide that my hatred for technology is not misguided. Happy only for air conditioning, and cures for polio, tuberculosis and other assorted diseases; as well as refrigeration and Fed Ex delivery from Amazon.com. Every other advance largely proves to be more trouble that it is worth and comes with unexpected consequences. But, for the moment, it looks like I'll have my new website back. Pretty happy since I dropped days into construction. Whew.
6 comments:
Oh crap. I sense my smudgy fingerprints all over this.
I assume you have backups to yesterday's version of the website, that you could at least restore it to yesterday's contents.
If you don't have backups as you make changes (you personally, not the web provider), it is probably a good habit to start. You never know if something should happen, and you have to recreate the web site from scratch. I find every so often, I've messed things up, and it is good to start over from a known good release.
And to those reading this, backups of your web site becomes even more important if you use the various free/cheap web providers (I assume Kirk uses a more standard web server). I've read too many tales of providers going belly up without any warning, and people being stranded because that web site had their only copy of the pictures. It is the same issue as having all of your pictures on a single computer. If you have data (pictures, videos, web site, email, contacts, etc.) in only one location, sooner or later, something will happen, and you will have no data.
I have a good copy of the site and a good copy of the updates, locally, the issue is the upload to the host. Once uploaded the structural integrity of the site is crap; no type shows and thumbnails are all over the place. Just found out that the host "upgraded" the servers over the weekend and all the fault may be on their end. I am not using a bargain host. I do have back ups. Pain in the butt when you can't figure out who is in the wrong. Anger and frustration when you figure it out and they still can't get your stuff right. Maybe time to sever a 20 year local hosting relationship and find some other provider.
Good luck! I feel your pain. :-) I have had my website hosted since 2006 at the same company. I do updates almost everyday using ftp. Last week for several days though I could not connect with ftp. I rebooted my computer, tried different ftp software, and tried a different computer. No go. Finally I contacted the company. I discovered that the ftp host name that they gave me in 2006 and that worked fine all those years and as late as last Tuesday stopped working on Wednesday and they had a new host name for me to use now. They didn't bother to inform their customers of this change to their configuration though. :-( Fortunately, ftp works again now, but that is really crappy to make a change like that without telling their customers.
ALL o.k. now Kirk..........SMOOTH!
looks like you've made the changes people have offered
Spot on!!
one last one
title bars could be a bit bigger, maybe change font colour (color) too.
Hope your headache goes away
Sorry, I didn't realize it was the server to blame. Hopefully they have fixed things since your initial problem.
My day job is a computer programmer. Many years ago, we had a dispute with the bank on some charges. This was at the beginning of things being computerized, and my wife ran into a clerk that told her "it must be true, because the computer says so", and my wife replied to the effect "my husband programs those things, you are not filling me with confidence".
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