Well, I’ve just spent twelve hours thinking that all the work of the past year or more had just gone up in smoke.
Around 7 o’clock p.m. last night, the site suddenly disappeared without a trace.
Ryan lives in London England. I live in Vancouver. Canada, so it was the middle of the night for him. I wasn’t able to establish contact with him until this morning so it was a stressful night.
Interestingly, though I felt stress, I felt no panic or dismay, which was interesting feedback on the amount of release work I may have done. I opened up the old site (sbeckow.wordpress.com) and began taking pages from emails and remounting them to the old site.
Ryan tells me this morning that he doesn’t know why the new site went down and is investigating.
I for my part will be publishing only very minimally today and instead making copies of important posts that I realize now I would lose entirely if the site went down.
Arun, from around the globe in India, advises us to send a note to Facebook and Twitter when something like that happens. Thank you, Arun, for mentioning that. I almost never go to Facebook or Twitter regarding them as simply forwarding mechanisms. Next time I will do that.
He also points out that I might be able to recover old posts from Google cache.
(Having mentioned Facebook, let me add here that I don’t “do” friends on Facebook or other social-networking sites. If you’ve sent me a friend request and gotten no answer, it means that I don’t know how to answer you and don’t add friends, etc. It’s simply a matter of scarce time.)
If other webmasters have any more tips to offer, I am an open ear. I can be reached at [email protected]. However, please don’t write me just to say hello or to express yourself because, with 6,000 of you, that will quickly tie me down for the rest of the day.
Also, while I’m on the subject, once we have handled a matter via email, could you please refrain from sending a final note saying “Thanks!” That registers as a separate email and requires me to read it. When there are thousands of you, I think you can imagine how daunting the psychological impact is to see a fresh wall of replies from people one has already answered to. Just a matter of etiquette. Thanks.
OK, so today is just about site maintenance for me and perhaps a little rest after the stress of last night.
Because of an error that happened in my email, I realize that I do not have the Daily Digests from October 16, when we moved from the old site, until the present-day. If there are a few people who would be willing to divide the work of sending me copies of their old Daily Digests to replenish my collection, I’d appreciate it. Send me an email, let me know you’re willing, and I’ll divide up the task. I won’t be able to get back to you till later this afternoon (it’s 7:00 a.m. now). Many thanks.
You may want to make copies of your favorite articles. What last night’s adventure showed me is that this site could be taken down at any time.
I’m so glad to be chatting with you again!!! For a minute there I thought I’d said something that made some cabalist take out a contract on this site. I can’t let fear like that stop me from speaking out. I need to live with the risk every day that we may be taken down and have that be OK.
The next time we go down? If the change is permanent, I’ll fire up sbeckow.wordpress,com and continue there, just so you know.
I’ve had a really choppy night and am going to sign off for a while longer and just rest.
Namaste,
Steve