Justin Lloyd

Well this has been a fun week of technology shenanigans, I must say.

Have you noticed that this website has been devoid of new posts for the past two or three weeks?

Did you notice that I only create 10 new posts in July and not my self-imposed requirement of 20?

No?

Oh well, I noticed!

The past few weeks I have been busy with business projects, personal projects, a week long family visit, and a wonderful viral infection that knocked me six ways from Sunday. I also got to visit Legoland California. And nobody was supposed to notice because WordPress had posts queued up and ready to go.

Only they did not.

The posts, I mean.

Seems that the scheduled posts somehow disappeared completely in to the ether without ever showing up. I know that the articles were uploaded from my laptop to the server. I verified each post looked correct in the browser by previewing it. And then I quietly went away to enjoy myself.

And so did WordPress.

Or the database.

Or the server.

Or something.

The only thing I can think of is somehow the hard drive on the web server had an issue and was rolled back to an earlier backup. Either way, my scheduled posts went amiss and I will be re-uploading them once I return to a location with adequate bandwidth.

I blame myself for this little fiasco. I did not build in to my goals for this website any self-imposed rule to check that the server is up and running on a daily basis, with scheduled posts going live at the appointed times.

Of course, I did check more often than I care to recount when the site was first created and new and fresh and exciting to ensure that I had everything configured correctly.

But once I was reasonably confident that everything was running fine, I let the technological side of things take a back seat whilst I got on with the act of writing and content creation. I even wrote a script that pinged my cell phone cum SenseCam to alert me if the web server ever went off-line for more than an hour and send me a daily SMS of traffic statistics. And that worked just perfectly. I just did not account for WordPress, or the database, or that mystical something, throwing the proverbial monkey wrench in to the works, where everything appeared to be working fine, but actually was not.

I took my eye off the ball for a couple of weeks and technology screwed me.

Same old story.

But now that I am aware of the problem, I have a small personal quandary. Do I back-date the missing posts, filling in the blanks as it were? Or do I just put them up as new posts for this month?

Okay, back to the normally “scheduled” article writing. Thanks for understanding and letting me take this “unscheduled” break.

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