It’s been a rough weekend for blogging.
My blog hosting service, ixwebhosting.com, moved my blog to an upgraded server, which is a good thing. When this process is done it takes 48 to 72 hours to “propagate” across the web. This is not so good.
What this means is that my blog has been inaccessible for a day or two.
Sorry ’bout that. Hopefully everything is fixed now.
It is very interesting to observe how some of us have been changed by technology and the Internet, and not always for the better.
I started getting reports a couple of days ago from facebook users that they were receiving error messages or experiencing other weird browser behavior when clicking on my blog link there. Some of these reports ended with the question: “am I doing something wrong?”
Apparently we are now conditioned to think if something doesn’t work it must be our fault. In this case that simply wasn’t so. The problem is no doubt in some setting I have made in the blog design, or perhaps on one of the servers that hosts my domain. Even more likely there is something wrong with the way NetworkedBlogs, a facebook application, is messing with the links in an attempt to keep everyone at the facebook domain.
I know just enough technologically about what I’m doing here to be dangerous. I have a pretty good “big picture” of the various involved processes, but admit I lack indepth knowledge about many of the finer details. The way things are built online today a user doesn’t have to understand the bytes and bit to build a pretty cool website or blog.
Still, I know enough to be able to tell that some web applications work rationally and are user friendly: WordPress, Joomla and google all come to mind. Then there are those web processes that live on the other site of the track in a neighborhood called Irritation: facebook has a corner lot there.
I have already removed the facebook badge from my blog once I discovered how badly it slowed things down. I’m already running enough widgets and plugins as it is and pity any visitor who is still using a dial up connection (Hi Tom!) I am unwilling to give up on facebook, the Net’s second busiest address (google is #1) yet. I get too much of my blog traffic from friends there.
Troubleshooting is difficult because I do not always see my site the same way my readers do. I use Firefox, for example, but you may be using Chrome, or Safari or that other browser that I can’t bring myself to name publicly. Every browser can display certain elements of web pages differently.
I have cookies enabled on my computer, and have passwords stored so I don’t have to remember them all. I may be able to see protected content without even knowing it is being blocked to others.
All of these things make my life easier, but they also be work against me when it comes to troubleshooting.
What can you do about it? Talk to me! Report any problems via comments, please. I really do appreciate it.