Did you see my crazy blog? On Friday and Saturday, my website looked awful. Little by little, a bug ate up all my posts, pictures, and even my header, replacing them with random images. (A tire? A pine cone?!)
I try not to bore you with talk of technical difficulties on my blog. After all, you’re here for the recipes, not for a lesson in computers. But today I feel it needs to be addressed, since so many of you have recently been reporting 404 errors when you click on a recipe link. Please accept my apologies for all the trouble, and know that I’m doing everything I can to fix it as soon as possible.
When Good = Bad:
I’ve had to upgrade server packages four times in the last two months! But there’s a downside to this growth: a person needs to know quite a lot about technology to manage all the wild things that can happen to a high-traffic site. I’m struggling to learn it all as fast as I can. And every time a reader sends me an email addressed to my webmaster, I have to laugh. Webmaster? Unfortunately, I’m the only webmaster for chocolatecoveredkatie.com… and that’s a scary thought, considering I didn’t even know what HTML stood for until last year.
(Honestly, it’s amazing my site runs at all!)
C-panels, dedicated servers, caches… who knew running a food blog required so much technical knowledge? I really appreciate your patience as I try to fix all the craziness with my blog. And if anyone has an idea as to why people are suddenly getting 404 errors on pages that DO exist, please let me know! I’ve tried so many different ways to fix it—and nothing has worked.
For your patience in sticking with me, I promise you a really yummy post tomorrow.
Question of the Day:
Are you good with computers?
Or are you clueless, like me? Actually, to be fair to myself, I’m not clueless anymore; I’ve learned a lot. But oh my word, was I ever clueless when I started this blog!
Also: Is my site working ok for you now? Or are you still getting error messages?
Sorry you have been having all these problems. I have not gotten an error message yet and it all looks good to me…
It looks to be working fine right now 🙂 Blog technical problems are the absolute worst. I feel like I’ve learned a million technical things in the 7 months or so I’ve been blogging and I bet that doesn’t even touch upon what you’re probably dealing with. There seriously needs to be some sort of technical support that you can actually call for independently run blogs! haha
I actually work for a computer repair business so I know quite a bit…sometimes enough to be really dangerous 🙂 I’m learning about website design and such now so this could be fun. Google is always your friend when it comes to looking up fixes!
My problem is that I’m afraid to implement fixes I find on google for fear of accidentally doing it wrong and making things worse! 😕
Your site worked on and off Friday-Sunday. There were a couple of recipes I wanted to try and I had no trouble finding those particular posts (Fudge Babies and Flourless Chocolate Chip Cookies; both delicious!).
I’m HORRIBLE with any kind of html, coding, or website work. I’m in the process of having my own site redesigned by a pro..it’s worth the money to me!
It’s working fine for me! 😀
The site is working perfectly for me!
Sorry for the bad bug on the blog (can you say that 10 times fast?) though :\
I’m somewhat good with computers. I can dig around a hard drive and such but not that much.
I also learned how to create a website (nothing fancy, just more like a file that can open a webpage but was very VERY plain)
It is working for me! And I am terrible at computers, so more credit to you for figuring out all of the technical issues!
Your site looks great! We all have issues from time to time – it’s just part of blogging. No big deal, though you were greatly missed! As a side note, my husband is a professional computer geek (also known as a webmaster, among other things) and would be happy to help you out. Let me know if you want his contact info – he’s cheap 🙂
Aww sure! Does he do wordpress? Would he have any idea why people might be getting 404s on my site on pages that still exist and that others can still see?
That’s awful, Katie! ughghhh…..good luck fixing it. I would have no clue where to begin! (That’s what computer geniuses are for 😛 )
Sorry you’re dealing with all this crap…ugh! I went thru massive issues about 4-6 mos ago, as I shared with you on email and have had lots of behind the scenes stuff, too.
I agree, blogging is learning on the job when it comes to computers. Funny, we start out as cooks, but become photographers…and computer programmers in the process!
The site’s working great. Thanks for your work to make this such an oasis of creativity and tasty treats!
No worries – will wait for chocolate. 🙂
I wish I knew more! That’s why my blog still looks so lame, because I have absolutely no idea what I’m doing. I do enjoy blogging, so I keep it up, even with the lame look. But I feel your pain!
I am so NOT good at computers. Everything I know I’ve learned through trial and error while blogging. It scares me to think of all the ways things could go wrong on my site!
Yikes — sounds complicated! It’s working fine for me though.
Also, “A tire? A pine cone?!” Ha! I wish I had seen those 🙂
Hope you get all the kinks worked out!
I’ve been co-administrator on some .php based game sites with medium, concentrated traffic (probably 50-75 regular daily users with only 5 or so signups a week on average) and dealing with some of those bugs were just awful! Even I have trouble with it, and I went to school for it 😀
If it makes you feel any better, I wanted your chocolate recipe SO BADLY that when I saw the link/blog had broken, I copied the recipe link and went to google and searched it…the post came right up in the results, had already been indexed, of course (google indexing spiders are FAST these days!) so I hovered over the arrow with the result, then clicked the blue “Cached” link in the window that popped up on the right…BOOM there it was. Worse comes to worst, google caches are to blogs as revision histories are to google docs!
Oh, and the chocolate? DIVINE. <3
Awww :).
I’m so sorry for the trouble, though! If you ever can’t get to a recipe, email me and I can copy/paste it. But thanks for the tutorial on how to find cached pages… I might need it someday in the future if my blog goes crazy again!