Our First Horse

If you visited our site in the past couple of days, you probably noticed it was down or in various stages of undress. Our server company accidentally deleted our server and they didn’t have a backup. While the free stuff they’re giving us to smooth things over is appreciated, it’s hard to put a value on the time it takes to restore a WordPress site and call it good. Yes, of course we have backups of everything. But there’s no magic button to restore everything like it was (there are actually services that can do that for you but you have to pay and this site doesn’t make any money). We didn’t lose any posts, thank goodness, but we’re still working on restoring images. We’ll get it in time. Please be patient.

In the meantime, this was a great time to upgrade to a better, faster, and more secure server and you may notice our site now loads via https. That’s a Google requirement starting in October of this year, so we’re a little ahead of the deadline. While we don’t store any secret stuff here, there’s no harm in putting an extra lock on the door.

You may have noticed that our site was down for a few days. Servers need to be updated just like other computers. However, what was supposed to be a routine server update, turned into a full rebuild and restore. It’s not something we had time to do but that’s life. So we took the opportunity to upgrade and update other features to improve speed and security and I think we’re almost entirely back to normal. You may see something funky here and there but for the most part, everything should be here (thank goodness for backups!).

During this process, I came to realize that it’s been a few years since we updated the design, so Mikki and I will be working on a refresh soon.

Subscribers – we switched to a new subscription system so you’ll need to re-subscribe. We thought of moving everyone but many subscribers were just spammers so we felt it was best to start from scratch. Those who subscribe will receive an email when we post something, which is a great way to keep in touch since we haven’t been posting new entries very often.

Thanks for reading!

In response to a growing fan base and complaints about slow performance, we’ve upgraded our server hardware. We’re also taking the opportunity to upgrade our software and apply security patches. Upgrades like this take a little while so please bear with us for a few days. When we’re done, you should notice a considerable improvement in the speed and reliability of our site.

In addition to the site being occasionally offline, you may notice some of our images not loading or the design being off. Thanks for your patience!

10/23/10 Update: Posts, pages and comments are all restored and the site is functional, though a few pages that require special coding aren’t working just yet. And as you can tell, the design is a little different. I may use this as an opportunity to update the style but at the moment it’s kind of ugly. Expect some design changes over the coming days and feel free to make suggestions and offer constructive criticisms.

We’re also enabling some new features, such as post tagging and automatic mobile versions of the site when you view it on an iPhone, Blackberry, Windows 7 smart phone or other mobile device.  Starting with this post, we’re also bringing back representative images. The new software update made is considerably easier to add images to our posts and as long as we don’t overdo it, I think images add a lot.