In October, the company which provided the hosting for our sites and email accounts lost service for almost a week. I doubt anyone noticed that the web sites were not available, but emails to us just plain disappeared, with no message back to the sender. When we started getting the same symptoms again in November, we bit the bullet and started recreating everything at a new company, once again losing some email.
So far as we’re aware, everything is back up and running again, and technical support at the new place has been great. This was not an easy decision, not least because I’d prepaid for three years to keep the cost down, and I think we were only about a year in. (So, if anyone wants to host an experimental site, real cheap, let me know. Definitely no up-time guarantee, though!)
Meanwhile, I finally got around to recreating a testing facility on my PC, after re-building my WIndows 10 system from the ground up in January, and so I got around to fixing and enhancing the theme I’d developed for my WordPress sites. Yes, the very site you are reading this on! Part of my upgrade process was rationalizing the number of different image sizes my theme uses, and sending all my images to a service that reduces their size by up to 80%, so the pages are now loading more quickly. Now I’m working on cutting down the words by 80% – no, not really – as you can see!
I’ve gone back to some of the earlier posts to update places where I knew there were references to other sites which no longer exist, but I can’t say I’ve done a post by post check. I did find that some posts which had inline pictures instead of a gallery collection (the minority) lost the images, because the code was looking for an image size that no longer exists – so if you find any posts with missing photos, please let me know.
I would encourage you to click on any image you like to get a bigger version (well, it’s bigger on a REAL computer, your phone may not show much difference!) and once in that “bigger” mode, you can arrow-key forwards and backwards through photos, while staying in big-mode. There’s also a feature which allows you to subscribe to getting an email when there is a new post (look down near the bottom of the page) which didn’t always work on the old hosting platform, I believe because it was so slow the site timed out when processing these requests. This seems to be working now. It’s probably easier to wait for December and take a look then, because in the past I’ve been rather lax in updating until late in the year when I play catch-up, but I do want to add posts more regularly. Of course, that could be another reason to avoid subscribing!
Happy reading – and please feel free to share any suggestions you may have regarding the site!
