In case you didn’t notice, The Other McCain was offline for about two hours in the middle of the day today. It is now back online. We are grateful to the gnomes and elves at the Enchanted Forest of Service Providers for their use of pixie-dust and other magical charms to repair the Rube Goldberg contraption that is our custom-hosted WordPress platform.
Meanwhile, however, the advertisements are MIA, as are several other usual features on the sidebars of the site. Smitty will probably restore these features shortly after I post this message, and will then add an update with some snarktastic commentary on my utter lack of appreciation of the technological gee-whizzery by which all this kind of stuff is accomplished.
Some people like to tinker with computers. I am not one of those people. Rather, I am compelled, by the nature of my occupation, to cope with computers. This puts me at the mercy of computer-tinkerers who, like all my friends who were invited to speak at Smart Girl Summit, get their most pleasant recreation by laughing at me behind my back.
My life’s purpose, it seems at times, was foretold by the title of a George Carlin comedy album, Occupation: Fool.
UPDATE: Smitty is offline, coping with real-world problems at a Chrysler dealership. Meanwhile, I present Portrait of a Blog Disaster:
What you see here is that we began the morning with a promising upward surge of traffic, which increased 26% from the 8 a.m. to 9 a.m. hour. At some point after 10 a.m., however, the magic inside the Enchanted Forest began to go awry. Visitors to the site began to have difficulty getting the page to load properly and, sometime between 11 a.m. and noon, the escalating failure became complete.
Blog traffic has a certain momentum. If other bloggers cannot access your site at 11 a.m., they cannot link your posts at noon. Regular readers who discover that your site will not load at noon might try again at 12:30, but if it doesn’t load the second time, they’re unlikely to try again soon. Ergo, the traffic lost during “down time” has a negative impact on every subsequent hour so that, after service was restored around 1 p.m., the level of traffic was lower than the 9 a.m. hour, and the promising momentum of the morning was lost.
Q.E.D.
Every new click onto the blog is an opportunity, you see, and every opportunity missed is a complete loss that can never be remedied. No matter how many thousands of people visit this blog on Saturday, we have lost forever the value of those several hundred would-be visitors who could not reach the site for those two or three hours during which we were not properly accessible. And every minute that the advertisements are “down” represents a loss of potential value to people who pay good money to advertise here.
It is the irreparable nature of these lost opportunities that depress me. A writer naturally wishes to think that his work has value, that his words edify the reader, who somehow benefits — becoming more informed, or at least being pleasantly amused — by the encounter. Who knows what benefit might have been gained by readers, had the site not gone down this morning?
Perhaps my conception of the blog, of its value to readers and advertisers, seems grandiose to some. Yet I occasionally get e-mails from readers who thank me for something I’ve written, making me aware that this project is at times more meaningful than my sarcastic humor may suggest.
To our readers and advertisers, then, I sincerely apologize for the loss represented by our technical problems today. No one regrets this more than I.
