Tag: blog

Moving on again

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My time with Siteground as the hosting company for this blog is coming to an end. Their very attractive $3 a month deal, which I have had for three years now, suddenly jumped to $30. In anyone’s books, this seems a bit excessive, but with the ANC doing their level best to drive the Rand into the floor (and then some way beyond), the company were, as the old saying goes, “having a giraffe”.

I mean, they’ve been good, but not that good.

[As a side note, the jury is still very much out on Flickr.]

And so – once again with the invaluable help and advice from The Guru – I’ll be heading (or should that be swerving, lol) to Veerotech in the very near future.

You guys couldn’t notice the seamless transition, so this is really just a post to tell you that if you do see anything a bit weird here over the next couple of weeks (like for instance the blog turning to a kitchen and bathroom store in Pennsylvania), then that’s probably what it is and normal service will be resumed as soon as possible.

Fingers crossed though, it’ll all be lovely.

About the blog

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It’s weird, isn’t it?

Not the blog, (Although…)

Last night, out for dinner, lovely evening. The blog thing came up. And our friends said:

It’s amazing that you find something to write about each day.

And we laughed.

But it kind of is, given that it’s been 11½ years. But there have been a lot of days when I can’t think of anything, and suddenly this is one of them. Bit meta.

Still managed a post though.

Again.

Day 61 – The Tale of The Broken Blog

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The server that 6000.co.za lives in fell over today, and I had to write a blog post on Facebook, just in case I couldn’t write a blog post on here.

Fortunately, Germaine H came to the rescue and propped the server up with a makeshift scaffold fashioned from kebab sticks, dental floss and some clay.

I’ll probably delete the Facebook post now, but let’s preserve it here first, just because:

Howdy, readers!

There is clearly some issue at my hosting company and I’ve been on hold on three different platforms for over an hour now with no response. So – for the moment, at least – today’s 6000dotcodotza blog post will be posted on Facebook.
It’s a blog post about not being able to post a blog post.
You’re reading it right now.

So very meta. I hope your minds can cope.

I’m optimistic that the engineers at Afrihost will get their act together in the very near future and put the server plug back into the wall after the cleaning lady socially distanced it from its socket, although the fact that they haven’t responded to anything in a long, long time doesn’t fill me with hope. They don’t even seem to know that anything is wrong: head to their network status page and ‘hosting’ has got a big green light and the legend:

Everything is looking good!
There are no problems to report at this moment

But there clearly are problems, one of them being that there’s no-one there to report them to.

Please watch out for updates on here, and – if I get lucky (careful now) – on 6000.co.za as well.

Thanks for reading!

So now you’ve read a blog post about a blog post about not being able to post a blog post on the blog I wasn’t able to post on.

And with that, I think it’s high time for a drink.

Oh, and a gentle reminder to follow 6000.co.za on Facebook – just in case this sort of thing happens again.

Day 2 – Cabin fever?

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Not for me (yet), although there have been some worrying developments.

Firstly, this one:

which is not great when everyone is stuck at home and needs to use the internet. It also almost crashed the blog, which would really not have been good. Although 6000.co.za is hosted locally, when I tried to update a plugin  – a process that usually takes a few seconds – it went to get the update from overseas, got stuck and for a while, I was only able to see:

Briefly unavailable for scheduled maintenance. Check back in a minute.

on any blog page or post I tried to access. For several or more minutes.

Fortunately, the blog obviously realised that something wasn’t quite right and reset itself before I went to work with a large virtual hammer in the the back end (careful now).

Phew.

The update will now wait until there is a decent connection to America (or wherever) again.

Then: the neighbourhood group has been alive with fake news on the current situation. Was that Whatsapp voicenote real (no, it wasn’t), should we clean our bin handles (yes, we should), is that man allowed to walk his dog on the school field (no, he’s not). And then in the middle of it all, this gem:

I have just microwaved our newspaper. ( Saturday one is only one we haven’t cancelled because of poor quality even though quality of Sat is not good either)

(Genuinely, I promise)

wut?!?!

For the record, microwaving may or may not kill coronavirus. It may or may not burn your house down as well. Do not microwave your newspaper. Just no.

Finally (for the moment, at least): As promised, I have set up an album called The Lockdown Diaries on Flickr. One photo a day during the lockdown. Don’t expect magnificence: this is just giving me something to do while I’m stuck at home, and I’m not going to get images of mountain ranges, racing cars or herds of wildebees being stalked by lions. My scope is a bit limited, which is why it will be a challenge.

On stats

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I reinstated Google Analytics on the blog this week. More out of interest than for any other reason, although it does open the door to potential future advertising and collaboration opportunities at absolutely no cost and very little effort. But it’s mainly just to look at some numbers.

And I do like numbers.

The rudimentary wordpress stats package thing that was automatically active on the blog is ok, but GA does give you so much more information.

And I do like information.

Of course, the numbers and the information mean so much more when you have lots of them to compare with each other. It’s (very) early days and most things that I’ve seen on there have left me completely unsurprised.

Except for one stat, which I had never really considered.

It appears that over the past three days, over 60% of people reading 6000 miles… are doing so on mobile devices. Woah! That’s a lot more than I had thought. I mean, I hadn’t really thought about it a lot, but if I had (and obviously, I have now, retrospectively), I would have thought (and now, as mentioned above, I have thought) it would have been a much smaller percentage than that. Like 10. Or 20.

Fortunately, thanks the genius that is The Guru, this blog is optimised for viewing on whatever size or type of device you choose. Thus, it should be a seamless, fluid, intelligent experience.

It’s just the content that lets it down.

And look, the site looks good to me when I occasionally log in on my mobile device, but if you’re on your phone right now, how is it looking? Please let me know if things aren’t working ok for you (I mean on the blog, not in life generally) (there are professionals who can help you with that kind of thing) (I’m far from professional).

I’m going to review my stats once I’ve got enough data to review, and I might post about it on here if there’s anything worth posting about. In the meantime, in the same sort of vein, I apparently had quite a good day (by my standards) on Flickr yesterday (mainly thanks to this post referencing this post referencing this album, I’d imagine) with almost 7,000 views.

If I could get those sort of numbers on the blog, I could almost retire.

Almost.