I've Been Remiss With My Readers

Remember...
Learning is rowing upstream...
Advance or lose all.
Master Chen Hai Yang

I received an email not long back from a reader complimenting me on my great website. She said how she loved reading about my family, loved the images and especially the quotes. I have been remiss because for quite a few posts now I haven't included my special little "Remember... " quotes. I plan on rectifying that omission in this post, and will include the little quotes more often.

Some of you may have noticed that the site has been down since August 2nd. Not even an error page, just a "no such website" warning. Initially I thought the problem was with the server, and assumed the site would be back up soon. Thursday night I didn't log on. Last night I tried to visit a link and got an error. I tried the CPanel, and got an error. I searched Google for some posts from other annoyed users and couldn't find any. I was sure the site was down. I decided then to check my domain name. I had a vague recollection about it expiring. Sure enough, after I looked myself up on WhoIs, I discovered the domain had expired on August 2. The contact email address was no longer current and I hadn't received any email notifications.

Remembering who I had signed up with was another problem. I have that many links for domain name providers in my favourites because I look after lots of other people's websites, that it took me forever to find something that related to the bestoday.com.au address. I found where I'd written the hosting details, and discovered that I'd written down a wrong password. Since my email address with them was no longer in use I couldn't ask for a password reminder. I searched though all my emails since dot (thankful that I'm still a hoarder and have every email going back to 2002) and found one with a username and password. Thank God! That was for hosting though, and I've since changed hosting providers. After trying several combinations of username and passwords I finally discovered it was a combination of what I had written down and the email.

I keep a little book with usernames and passwords, and registration codes, etc. and I made sure all the info is in there. In another 2 years when the domain name renewal is due again I don't want to wonder for 3 days what is going on with my site.

I'm disappointed with Webshots too. They're no longer providing the code for creating links to their online photos, and though it's still possible to do it, there would be alot of copying and pasting. Just too time consuming. So unless I collect a few links and save them for a while, there'll be no sets of 3 small images. I rather liked them too. Something to do with copyright and all that jazz. It's a photo sharing website for pity sake. They've gone all "Pro" on us freebie users, and when that happens it's usually time to move on and find something else.