Website Update February 2024

Hi everyone,

In addition to a busy month of creating new content, I also experienced a challenging time when my websites (I have 5 main ones and one dealing with mental health) went down for three days and 11 hours. It wasn’t due to the site being hacked or anything like that, but it was the result of an unplanned, unexpected, and immediate need to switch to a new server. Normally, people migrate from one server to another, the transition is almost seamless because there is no downtime at all. This was not the case.

There are too many details to explain the process of website migration and DNS propagation (the process of updating domain name system records across the Internet, which can take a couple of days itself), but I routinely back up my entire websites regularly to restore them in such situations. Perhaps, I will explain this more at some point.

However, for the moment, I will spend the next few weeks dealing with the hiccups of such migrations which often include missing files, quirky server behavior, and system modifications. With this in mind, I invite and strongly encourage you to use my sites as much as you want and then contact me when–not if–you discover something that needs to be fixed. I expect this.

Perhaps, my main website was trying to tell me something; in the past 26 years of existence, I can only remember a few times when the sites were offline for more than a few hours at a time. There have been times when there have been issues that affected performance or the pages have not loaded properly or as quickly as I would hope, but in a way, the site said, “Hey, after 23 years, I deserve a few days break!”

Will such events happen again? Certainly, websites back in the 1990s were so simple without SQL databases, PHP coding, and the multiplicity of elements that go into sites today. However, I’ve learned a lot as well.

Thanks for being a part of this learning community. Your kind comments are what makes this work exciting.

Randall