I’m pleased to announce that I think the recent technical problems on the blog have been fixed.
Rejoice!
On the other hand, what a ride.
When this problem began three days ago, I immediately called my hosting company (Bluehost), which has 24-hour support. That’s one of the things I like about Bluehost; you can actually speak to a real live person 24-hours a day, 7 days a week, and the hold time is usually very short. So far so good.
I told them it was probably some sort of cache problem on their end, but they initially denied it and insisted it was a code problem on my end and that I needed to hire a web developer to fix it. A search revealed that there are quite a few companies that offer themselves as troubleshooters for problems with WordPress blogs, and they charge varying fees for the service. But I couldn’t get any of these companies to get back to me. With one, for example, I kept opening tickets with questions, but I never heard a word back.
Meanwhile, I kept doing my own research as well as phoning Bluehost. This took an enormous amount of time, as you can imagine. I called Bluehost about seven times altogether, and talked for at least a half hour each time. But for those first five or so times (and this included each support person going to multiple supervisors for guidance) they insisted it was a code problem on my end, whereas I insisted it was a caching problem on their end. A frustrating standoff.
Well, to make a very long story shorter, some friends and bloggers kept telling me that it indeed was a cache problem, and they gave me enough details that I was finally able to convince the folks at Bluehost that it was a cache problem and that it was on their end. But now Bluehost was insisting (late last night) that I needed to upgrade to hosting on the cloud.
This morning I called again. This time I got a gentleman who said “Oh, I’ll clear the cache on our server.” And voila, problem solved…at least for now.
So I didn’t have to spend extra money getting someone to delve into my code and fix it. I didn’t have to upgrade and give Bluehost more money. Had I gotten someone knowledgeable there on the phone in the first place, I wouldn’t have had to spend three days working on this, nor would you have had to have the frustration (and fun?) of posting under identities other than your own when autofill decided to become a trickster. All of this was apparently due to a caching problem at the server, causing the cached versions to keep displaying rather than updating.
What did I learn from all of this? I learned that people can pay scads of money—up to $20,000 per month (and no, that’s not a typo)—for a dedicated server, if their traffic is high enough. I’ve learned that support staff don’t always have a clue what they’re doing (although I suppose I already knew that). I learned that these days we often get the semblance of support and competence—fancy advertising on websites, “tichets” that you open that promise immediate response but that are messages in a bottle that never reach shore—without the substance.
But most of all, at this moment I’m grateful that the problem seems to have been solved. I give a heartfelt thanks to that guy at Bluehost who knew what he was doing. And I hope the whole thing doesn’t happen again—but if it does, I know what a good provisional diagnosis would be, and I took notes so I can remember.
By the way, if there ever is a problem of a similar sort (and I hope there never is), I recommend that you either hit the CTRL + F5 keys simultaneously to see the latest version of the blog, or if that doesn’t work, add “?no-cache=1” (minus the quotation marks) after my blog URL neoneocon.com. You might want to note that down, as well as the address of my old blog if all else fails: http://neo-neocon.blogspot.com .
Boy, I hope this post shows up in a timely fashion. If not, it’s back to the drawing board.
Test comment to see if it shows right up. (The last few I tried to post either took hours to appear or never showed up at all.) I am myself in the autofill, so that’s a good sign.
Ha! It did.
Neo,
I hope that you got the name and direct phone number of the “gentleman” who assisted you. That could be invaluable in the future.
Welcome to my world…
this is what i go through every day, and the reason its this way is MANAGEMENT..
go here, and read the antipatterns from development, to implementation to more… and see how managment makes this bad
1) old programmers are bad they dont learn (yeah, computers are exactly he same way they were in 1970, and i am just hanging on not learning)
so they hire young people who dont know the minefield and they HAVE to make the same old same old bad mistakes!!! and hate the oldsters who have learned that just cause it sounds great, doesnt mean its great in practice.
take liberalisms idea that top down elite ideas are the best and you have a formular for really really bad things.
in this case… most programmers are mediocre, but a few are high performance. the rules to try to get some consistencey in the mediocre completely level the high performance players…
i just got transfered, just before a raise again
so no raises for 12 years, abuse, etc (neo never put up the images of my office to see if anyone could help, i had a stroke, and lawyers i found said i had no rights… so… wife and i are barren, never got help, and i am waiting to die as i cant do a thing now)
anyway, thye like MUSHROOM MANAGEMENT here as a way to messup things while you thiink your controlling te bad.
ie. no programmer gets to ask any person they are doing work for, questions. it has to go through one person, so ALL work is bottlnecked… two, we play gossip as the message gets changed, so dont produce what the client wants… and if the client and other are not fully cognizant which they never are as its a manger pretending they know the job talking to another manager that pretends they know the job, neither can program, neither know in detail what their emplolyees do
its called musroom management because you feed us shit, and leave us in the dark
AntiPatterns
What Is an AntiPattern?
https://sourcemaking.com/antipatterns
and they wonder why they are 200 million in the hole, health care is expensive, and they dont get returns like insurance, banking, and manufacutring, which dont do this
even funnier they want to game the contests for best work place asking employees to cheat and vote.. while ignoring glass door dot com which puts up all their bad stuff for the public to read the way Zagats does for food…
I suggest you get a new hosting service.
I see, Neo, that all during your technical consultations and investigations, you managed to comment on the Canadian softwood tariff, the Iran nuclear deal, coloratura sopranos, and Anne Frank. My sincere compliments and– what brand of vitamins did you say you are taking? Seriously, my compliments.
PS My autofill is working fine again.
oh, and the BEST part about how the elite do thigns this way and mess them up is GREAT..
if it works, and i make the impossible happen, i get no reward as that is whats expected, and they get accolades and raises… on my dime as my family is exterminated by policy
and if it doesnt work, they throw you under the bus as its not their fault the world is full of bad programmers
heads they win, tails you lose.
Wooly Bully:
Problem is, as far as I can see through my research so far, I would either have to pay a LOT more money, and/or get the same lousy service or worse. At least Bluehost has phone support. Many of the others don’t, unless you pay 10 times what I’m paying. This business of opening up a ticket and waiting for an emailed or chat response often seems to gain you communication with bots or automated responses, or people with really poor communication skills.
If you have a recommendation for a good host with actual people you can talk to, I’d love to hear it. Thanks in advance for any suggestions.
I’m with Decius:
Walgreen’s “The Daily Multivitamin,” iron-free. Just the basics.
I have been kind of running myself into the ground the last few days. Now I am glad to breathe a sigh of relief. I get very distressed when there are technical problems on the blog. You wouldn’t want to be around me. But now I’m all mellowed out.
AND YOU’RE BACK ! Up to speed and congratulations on sweet success.
Neo – there was a post on Legal Insurrection re authors opinion on the 100 days. A commenter asked what happened to you, in a snarky way. I mentioned that you were dealing with blog issues and that comment actually got an upvote!
Glad the problems seem to be fixed but I’ll keep the cache adjustment in my link since it seems to work. I wonder how the professor has the link from his blog to yours set up since it always showed the most recent posting.
Liz:
Yes, I got word of that 100-days thing at LI but at the time I was so massively embroiled in dealing with this mess that I couldn’t add that task to all the others.
I bet the links at LI somehow bypassed the cache with some sort of override. Maybe it’s a feed of some sort.