Anecdote and Update

Update

As you can see, our Home page is now running as it should. The site is stable and hopefully you can see a small improvement in responsiveness. The latter is a small silver lining in a very dark cloud.

Anecdote

Yesterday evening we were invited over to our daughter’s for an early dinner (we got home to St. John’s two days ago). After supper and after the little ones were packed off to bed, we were chatting and my daughter asked the usual, “What are you up to?”.

Hmmm, what to say. So I explained a bit about the problem with our website (she has built a couple of websites of her own). I explained to her how with experience and knowledge of computer systems, one can often solve problems by making a couple of guesses and checking them out.

However, I said the most powerful tool I’ve ever come across for solving the problem of a system (of any kind) that has stopped working properly, is to concentrate on what has changed. This is especially true when one is convinced that nothing has changed — that will simply not be true if the system was working and stopped working.

I apply that simple strategy whenever I do problem solving. I’ve been using it while recovering this website.

When I went to bed last night, I was mulling the strategy over and realized there was one change that I made while recovering the website — because of the other problems I had wanted to post updates. Because of the other problems, when I posted a blog using my “blog site”, it didn’t show up on the Home page. So I simply posted them on the main blog site. That broke the Home page!

Fixing this was trivial. I simply removed those posts and voila, back to normal!