Patterico's Pontifications

11/14/2012

Site Problems

Filed under: General — Patterico @ 7:18 pm



Just got off the phone with my friend — the same guy helping Anita Busch and the victims of the Aurora shooting, as it happens. Also the guy who, years and years ago, designed the “Patterico’s Pontifications” banner and newspaper you see at the top of this site.

I’ll have to ask him later if he wants any publicity. Given the enemies I have, he may say no.

I started to write a post about how he seemed to have put a Band-aid on the wound I opened this morning by messing with my Main Index Template. Then I tried saving the post and it didn’t save. And the site is hanging up once again — off and on. One second it’s doing fine. The next, it’s screwing up.

Anyway, my friend plans to do some improvement and upgrades in coming days. I apologize for the horrible problems most of you had today (inability to load the sidebar, inability to fully load the site, inability to comment, etc.). All I can tell you is, we’re working on it. I’m not completely sure when it will get better.

A denial of service attack is not impossible, but I tend to believe there is a mundane explanation.

Whatever the cause, it may be a bumpy ride for a couple of days.

I’m not sure how to thank my friend, so for now I’ll just say: thanks, buddy.

31 Responses to “Site Problems”

  1. And yeah, I tried moving the Amazon widget back where it originally was. As did my friend. No luck.

    Patterico (8b3905)

  2. Thanks, anonymous IT guy. Thanks especially for helping the victims of the shooting, too.

    Dustin (73fead)

  3. Man, no matter how many times I do it and regardless of how many years I have been in this field, I have to constantly say to myself, “MAKE A BACKUP!!!”

    If this is running on a VM in the cloud somewhere, there may be a backup. Ask your buddy…

    WarEagle82 (97b777)

  4. Man, no matter how many times I do it and regardless of how many years I have been in this field, I have to constantly say to myself, “MAKE A BACKUP!!!”

    If this is running on a VM in the cloud somewhere, there may be a backup. Ask your buddy…

    WarEagle82 (97b777)

  5. Man, no matter how many times I do it and regardless of how many years I have been in this field, I have to constantly say to myself, “MAKE A BACKUP!!!”

    If this is running on a VM in the cloud somewhere, there may be a backup. Ask your buddy…

    WarEagle82 (97b777)

  6. Looks like I created several backup comments here…

    WarEagle82 (97b777)

  7. Looks like I created several backup comments here…

    WarEagle82 (97b777)

  8. Hey, things are looking a bit better.

    If you want to test load times on a specific site go to http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/ and test any URL you want to see where load times are highest to help tune your system.

    Your stats there right now look okay.

    WarEagle82 (97b777)

  9. If you need a backup of your sidebar from before you started messing with it, try archive.org. I’ve successfully recovered pages from there when I’ve made similar booboos.

    Milhouse (15b6fd)

  10. there’s a reason for the ole saying:

    If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

    I can’t begin to enumerate the times I decided to “tweak” something (you name It) and proceeded to then have to work for hours to get it back to where I started before the “tweaks”. Sometimes that never happens.

    An expensive and time consuming lesson we all learn at one point or another Pat.

    I dread upgrading anything anymore.

    Jcw46 (f23062)

  11. Take it from this mainframe computer geek … the backup is your friend !

    (And even *I* don’t always take ’em quite often enough … yet I seldom regret having taken the ‘insurance’ precaution of having taken a backup)

    The other half of the equation is to make changes on a copy of whatever it is you want to change … and see what happens … and, ideally, you made the small changes easily reversible … like the Undo icon in Word …

    Alasdair (2cd241)

  12. I really thank you for the valuable info on this great subject and look forward to more great posts. Thanks a lot for enjoying this beauty article with me.
    I am appreciating it very much! Looking forward to another great article. Good luck to the author! All the best!
    Pet supplies

    SUMON (791de4)

  13. It’s been a little persnickety for me, but on Explorer 7 it is manageable. I was going to email you about a DofS or NYT link if it got worse.

    nk (875f57)

  14. Now you’ve done it Pat. You’ve attracted the attention of the Spammers. At least they were respectful and polite.

    Jcw46 (f23062)

  15. you forgot to blame Bush.

    redc1c4 (403dff)

  16. I blame liberals. You should too. Oh wait…you already do.

    dirk (f51e7a)

  17. It’s not backed up until you’ve reloaded from the backup. Write, then read.

    htom (412a17)

  18. To err is human, to really mess things up takes a computer.
    (Or a _______, fill in the villain of choice.)

    Comment by redc1c4 — 11/15/2012 @ 1:44 am
    I wonder if “Blame Bush” will be a permanent phrase added to the English language, long after anyone remembers who he was.
    (see: “It’s All the Fault of Adam”, for example http://www.doe.mass.edu/mcas/2007/release/g7ela.pdf pgs26-28)

    MD in Philly (3d3f72)

  19. ____________________________________________

    Anyway, my friend plans to do some improvement and upgrades in coming days.

    Whoever designed your message forum should have his or her eyes checked. Or if not that, then something unfortunately is preventing your blog from attracting and holding onto more users of this board.

    Mark (5bf7b1)

  20. ____________________________________________

    Anyway, my friend plans to do some improvement and upgrades in coming days.

    Whoever designed your message forum should have his or her eyes checked. Or if not that, then something unfortunately is preventing your blog from attracting and holding onto more users of this board.

    Mark (5bf7b1)

  21. Mark, get your head out of your ass. There’s not a single damned thing of any significance wrong with this message forum.

    Not a freaking thing. Unlike facebook, it actually manages to KEEP things posted on it. And it actually allows me to produce basic formatting (unlike FB) with clicks rather than inserting the html by hand.

    You could add things, like reply nesting, but that’s hardly required. So blow it out your ass. You’re insulting something that is actually quite well written, and that pisses me off. *Dick*.

    IGotBupkis, Legally Defined Cyberbully in all 57 States (8e2a3d)

  22. Mark, get your head out of your ass. There’s not a single damned thing of any significance wrong with this message forum.

    Not a freaking thing. Unlike facebook, it actually manages to KEEP things posted on it. And it actually allows me to produce basic formatting (unlike FB) with clicks rather than inserting the html by hand.

    You could add things, like reply nesting, but that’s hardly required. So blow it out your ass. You’re insulting something that is actually quite well written, and that pisses me off. *Dick*.

    IGotBupkis, Legally Defined Cyberbully in all 57 States (8e2a3d)

  23. Mark, get your head out of your ass. There’s not a single damned thing of any significance wrong with this message forum.

    Not a freaking thing. Unlike facebook, it actually manages to KEEP things posted on it. And it actually allows me to produce basic formatting (unlike FB) with clicks rather than inserting the html by hand.

    You could add things, like reply nesting, but that’s hardly required. So blow it out your ass. You’re insulting something that is actually quite well written, and that pisses me off. *Dick*.

    IGotBupkis, Legally Defined Cyberbully in all 57 States (8e2a3d)

  24. LOL, wasn’t showing it posted, despite regens.

    I repeat — Mark: Get your head of of your ass.

    IGotBupkis, Legally Defined Cyberbully in all 57 States (8e2a3d)

  25. I agree; Mark, do as advised above. If you’re so enamoured with those damned lines, write a greasemonkey script to insert them. You could even post it, if you think anyone else might be interested.

    Milhouse (15b6fd)

  26. Mark,

    When someone is working for free to get this forum working nicely, that person is doing something really nice. He’s not just doing it for Pat. He’s doing it for us, so we can enjoy our discussions.

    We should just say thanks and not insult the people who have done so.

    I actually tried to write a greasemonkey script to add your lines, but I just didn’t have the time to learn how to make it work correctly. I think Milhouse is right to suggest you should learn how to do so and then share this with our community.

    Instead of asking others to fix this, you can step up to the plate and do it yourself.

    Dustin (73fead)

  27. ___________________________________________

    Mark, get your head out of your ass. There’s not a single damned thing of any significance wrong with this message forum.

    Igot, I do have to chuckle since you say that and, at the same time, your post gets triple duplicated. Mine got duplicated just once, and I swear I didn’t press the “submit comment” more than once.

    So if the format of this forum is user-friendly enough (graphically) to most people — and its layout is pretty much unique in the world of cyberspace — then something else apparently is causing Patterico’s message board to attract few new people and perhaps lose some of the existing ones.

    I’m only puzzled because Pat did mention in a live chat a few weeks ago that he did welcome his blog getting more people to come aboard.

    We should just say thanks and not insult the people who have done so.

    Dustin, the person Patterico was referring to doesn’t sound like he had anything to do with this message board. Pat said he only worked on the blog itself, primarily the masthead.

    Mark (5bf7b1)

  28. So if the format of this forum is user-friendly enough (graphically) to most people — and its layout is pretty much unique in the world of cyberspace

    That is such blatant nonsense, I’m flabbergasted.

    Dustin, the person Patterico was referring to doesn’t sound like he had anything to do with this message board. Pat said he only worked on the blog itself, primarily the masthead.

    This is not a “message board”.

    Milhouse (15b6fd)

  29. Dustin, the person Patterico was referring to doesn’t sound like he had anything to do with this message board. Pat said he only worked on the blog itself, primarily the masthead.

    But you did insult whoever it is who helped set up the blog, and they did this for us for free.

    This is clearly important to you, and I think you should come up with a script that improves the page. Hopefully those who don’t like it are polite about it.

    Dustin (73fead)

  30. _____________________________________________

    That is such blatant nonsense, I’m flabbergasted.

    Then please post a link to another message forum that is very similar to this one. I’ve seen dozens of various boards through the years, and, if anything, quite a few of them tend to be the opposite extreme of this one: Overdone with avatars, color boxes, bars, lines, smileys, quotelines, gizmos galore. So from one extreme to the other.

    And, believe me, I wouldn’t be wondering (and commenting) about such things if the message volume of patterico.com were similar to that of hotair’s or huffingtonpost’s, or the forums under news articles posted to yahoo.com, etc.

    Mark (5bf7b1)


Powered by WordPress.

Page loaded in: 0.0842 secs.