A quick administrative note here. We’ve had occasional technical difficulties, though nothing too debilitating so far. Still, I was concerned that a technical problem could potentially bring the site down, and there would be no way to notify anyone as to what was going on. Our host had a brief service disconnection on Sunday — about an hour, as far as I could tell — and I was a little worried at the time, wondering how long it would last, and how to notify readers about what was going on.
It belatedly occurred to me that our original blogspot.com location could be put to a good use. Since the move to timesandseasons.org, waaaay back in November, we had not used this blogspot site for anything. (It did/does serve as an interesting archive — and take a look at the early sidebar! — but that’s about it).
So, as of today, I’m designating that location, www.timesandseasons.blogspot.com , as a technical/disaster back-up site. It will not be a “mirror” site of the regular blog; it won’t have blog posts on a regular basis (or at all, I hope). But if there’s a technical problem with the regular blog — a problem big enough that it makes the regular blog inaccessible — then the blogspot site will serve as a back-up location.
Also, the old site serves as a kind of food storage in case of a T&S disaster. I don’t know about 2 year’s worth, but: at least a 72 hour kit’s worth.
If all a blog is for is your daily fix of read-it-and-move-on information, then this solution would be satisfactory. If it is actually a repository of information that can be archived and searched and indexed by search engines, then it is wholly inadequate. If your provider is unreliable then get one who is.
I agree with Carl, my former companion. Hi Carl! Actually it isn’t even a great solution for the first situation in that you would have to remember to check the other site, since there won’t be a link to it. Seems like a band-aid solution to a larger problem.
I think that having a second domain that we can check for status in the event of an outage here is superb… and it doesn’t matter how great the host company is: everyone has outages.
If I were to make a suggestion, it would be that the status notice have more attention drawn to it… as it currently blends in to the content.
Perhaps there’s a way to edit the template so that the first post (or the latest post) is given a different CLASS marker… then all you need to do is update the STYLESHEET.
Just an idea.