Technical difficulties last Sunday put NunnaYerBizness Today out of business for a period. A database became what appeared to be irretrievably corrupted and made logging on impossible (as readers may have noticed). A database is the logical machine on which a Web site floats.
Our technical director, Justin Raines (who also holds the title The One Who Saves Your Ass) was busy with law school finals, which require particular attention, and was mostly unavailable but was able to get it back to a readable level, for which we thank him. On my own again, I wrung my hands most excellently for most of the week, fumed and fussed, studied code and database structure, and wrote hortatory emails to TOWSYA. More productively, I worked up some new graphics (one of which appears above) and will be testing new looks next week. Commentary will be welcomed.
Mr. Raines promised Saturday, but, after yet another email, engaged with the problem and solved it, using none of the procedures that my week’s study had produced, which was a good thing, too. It was a wonder to watch the man work. First users reappeared, then the posts, then times and dates, then comments, then categories and tags, then the theme re-applied.
My apology to contributors and readers is sincere. I am truly sorry we have made no new posts for the last week. We have four new poems and several pieces coming in from Denver. I am putting the poetry up immediately and the Denver pieces will follow shortly.
Thank you for coming back.
-stan
11 responses so far ↓
1 jgoggin // May 3, 2008 at 10:28 am
Excellent; well done Messieurs Raines. Glad you’re back “on the air.”
2 Patricia A // May 3, 2008 at 10:29 am
Welcome back!
You’re lucky to have such a resourceful son and that he’s studying law. If you keep writing “horatory emails” to corporations and public officials, you’ll probably need his pro-bono legal services someday.
Good luck. : )
3 jgoggin // May 3, 2008 at 10:33 am
And nice graphic, too. Even better in a bigger scale.
An interesting concept, Ms. A. don’t you think? A son who can fix both your website and your “public nuisance” tickets, as well.
Other brother, keep giving ‘em hell. Thanks for the forum.
4 sraines902 // May 3, 2008 at 1:09 pm
Thank you both for your kind comments. I’m also quite, quite pleased to be back on the air.
Before the crash, the stats module had us at somewhere around 75 or 80 views for the day. A lot of this was around the poetry, too. Of course, there was a poetry festival going on.
The day after the site crashed, views jumped to 125 and then kept at 50, 37, 47, and 50, and this was with no new material going up. And people were linkin in from email, so I know we were getting good word of mouth, the very best kind of advertising.
Well, let’s hope that they will come back. There is a market out there that’s hungry for new poetry and new voices. That’s what we’ll give them.
Build it and they will come, eh?
5 Justin // May 3, 2008 at 1:21 pm
The best kind of business for a business is word of mouth. The best kind of traffic from a web site comes from search engines.
6 Gene Novo // May 3, 2008 at 2:29 pm
5 3 08 p.m. …glad you’re back …. The 409 music scene earlier this week - Tuesday - sensational, and it might become a Fourth Tuesday/Last Tuesday ….
I am high from VIPF, having read five timee ….
And, I did some mprov in Spanish Thursday in a long long bridge line, my theme of watermelons like fat green pigs, and slices of same ….
Paz Pan Salud, Eugene “Gene” Novogrodsky
P.S. Will post a poem before NMCACWF this Tuesday ….
7 sraines902 // May 3, 2008 at 2:49 pm
We’re not quite a business yet (at least as far as the cash flow statement goes–all outs, no ins), and, while it’s slower, word of mouth creates a more stable base.
We are getting hits on the web, near the top of certain subjects, too. Try Jeff Lofton.
8 Justin // May 5, 2008 at 6:38 pm
I bet you totally top the list of “Stan Raines” too!
9 Stan // May 5, 2008 at 6:57 pm
Yes, we do. That guy with the trains doesn’t even show up till page two.
Of course, if we had some optimization going on here rather than talk, things might improve, eh?
10 jgoggin // May 6, 2008 at 6:41 am
Justin, I think I read somewhere recently that crawlers have grown more sophisticated, no longer blindly swallowing all the tags that people used to embed in
but are now actually scanning content for relevancy. Does that imply that we should strongly encourage people to tag their entries, or in the otherwise, that we should go back and do it ourselves (in an editing capacity)?11 jgoggin // May 6, 2008 at 6:49 am
You do seem to be in direct competition with a guy sitting amongst his marigolds, and another guy “Stan Rains” who has a very sad story to tell, much of which might be true.
I am, as I deem it appropriate, spreading it by word of mouth. But Justin is right; to get big hits, high prominence, you need the search engines to find you. But they will. The more corpus, the bigger target.
Ain’t this fun?
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