random thoughts – Day 1,553 – (Wednesday) – tech stuff and seafood

Once upon a sort of long ago time (February 8, 2013 if you want to be all precise about it) I bought a domain name through Go Daddy (tammydohner.com) and built myself a website with Wordpress. It was advertised as “easy” and took an entire weekend to build.

The initial reason for the website was to serve as an electronic resume and work portfolio to help with a job search which started as a Tennessee to Massachusetts long distance thing in advance of my move. The site had (has) a few (very few) photos in a gallery, a resume, images of jewelry and tie dye works, links to various writing projects, and client project samples from when I worked in a marketing agency. 

Over the (many) years, it became a habit to notice the automatic renewal charges hitting the credit card (cha-ching) and move on to other things. The site was periodically checked and links to the portfolio pieces sometimes needed to be rebuilt, but mostly, it ran on autopilot. More accurately, it lounged about in cyberspace. There were monthly notices about the automatic backups being performed and the subject line always read “Backed Up.”

Changes in Google analytics on the blog site pulled the website to the forefront of my brain. Blogger recently had an info banner about a deadline of July 1 for action needed to continue receiving statistics, which had me wondering if there was any action needed over on the website. 

Mostly, the Blogger data shows where people visit the blog from, which is almost 100% Facebook and a mysterious site called vampirestat-dot-com that doesn't seem to be currently active. The data also shows from which countries readers logged in, with surprising numbers from foreign countries. Slightly less than half of the locations are the United States. Singapore and Hong Kong have the lead for countries outside the US. I have no explanation for this, but it is exactly the kind of thing that could keep me awake at night as I puzzle it over.

Today was spent (invested? wasted?) dealing with all sorts of tech geek stuff, because I recently learned that the website had become inaccessible, and when I tried to visit it, there was an error message. The super sleuth skills slipped into action today. Go Daddy and Wordpress were visited. The last backup report was from March, and despite the email subject line of “Backed Up” the details in the message showed the backup wasn’t completed due to errors. (Maybe the subject line should reflect that nugget.)

A chat session with a Go Daddy guide helped fix the disappeared website issue. They found an error somewhere, fixed it, and the site was back in action. There was tooling around to try and update the template version and a bunch of technical stuff I barely comprehend. It would be a lie to say it took all day, because it took only about five solid hours, too much of which involved watching a circle spinning on the screen while the website got hung up. Five hours that a couple days ago, I had imagined spending on a beach. But the website is functional again and I probably still have a vitamin D deficiency and am still mostly summer freckle free. The fitness watch was on overload buzzing me with "sit too long" messages.

Seafood plate leftovers.

Today may not have been a day at the beach, but as a reward for the toil of the day, I ate like I was there. The preferred food delivery place (Primo’s) sent a 20% off a $30 order coupon last week that expired today. The fried seafood plate was ordered with onion rings instead of fries. And Ben & Jerry’s Cherry Garcia ice cream. 

Dining in the living room in front of the TV lacked the seashore ambiance of Brown’s or Markey’s or Sea Ketch, but the Primo’s plate is huge and there will be probably two more meals enjoyed from it. As for the ice cream, those containers are individual servings, right?