Daily Archives: March 25, 2015

No, not today, either . . .

But I’ll paint tomorrow for sure.

Maybe.

I spent the morning making some phone calls and working on some client stuff and then a little before 2pm Jan and I headed over to the SanTan area for a Wal-Mart / Sam’s Club run. When we were almost there, our friend Chris Yust called and said a customer had called her to say that the website I do for Chris, www.candcrvinsurance.com was down. So as soon as we were parked, I checked for myself,, and yes, it was down.


One of the strange things was the way it was down. There was no error message, no Page Not Found, nothing. It just sat there and whirled. That meant it was at least seeing something there, otherwise there would be a Page Not Found, or Website Not Found.

I put in a call to Godaddy, and after telling themmy problem, the young lady went off for a few minutes and came back to tell me the problem was with my site. She said the ‘index.shtml’ file (the first page of most websites) was invalid because it was named ‘.shtml’ instead of ‘.html’.

I can only guess she hasn’t been in this business very long because ‘.shtml’ is a perfectly valid extension that indicates that a Server Side Include is being used on the page. In this case it’s used to automatically update the ‘Last Date Modified date at the bottom of the page.

Figuring it was hopeless to pursue this further while we were on the road, I took a further look at things when we got home. The first time I did just to double-check was to replace the ‘index.shtml’ file with a plain-jane ‘index.html’ that did nothing except display the words Test Page. Can’t get much simpler.

And as I expected, that didn’t fix the problem, so I was back on the phone. But since I was getting into the busy part of their support day, I was number 15 in the queue. So I decided to take it up again after supper.

Nick and Terry were staying in, and Jan wanted some Hot and Sour Soup for her cold, so about 4:45 we headed over to the #1 Eastern Chinese Buffett a couple of exits west on Signal Butte. We’ve eaten here a number of times, including last Thursday, our first day in town, and it’s always great.

Besides the Hot and Sour Soup, I’m crazy about their boiled shrimp, fresh and crisp when you bite into them, not mushy like it is when they’ve been frozen.

Getting home it was back on the phone, and this time I was only number 3 in the queue. As I was waiting, I tried a number of other things, the first one being to check my other sites on this same server. And it turns out they were down too. Hmmmm!

But this site, OurRVAdventures.com, was still up. Not unusual, since this is a WordPress site, and although it’s in my Godaddy account, it’s hosted on a different server.

I next checked my sites that, although the domain names are with Godaddy, they’re hosted with a different company, Superb.net. And they were all working fine. So it’s not a domain name problem, it’s a problem on my shared server.

I won’t bore you with any more details, but after an hour and 30 minutes of checking everything, the Godaddy rep and I could not figure it out. We could see the problem, we just couldn’t see what was causing the problem.

So at that point it was boosted up to Level 3 support, and I got off the phone. I set my computer to keep trying the site, and about 30 minutes everything started working again.

I got an email from them saying it was working, but no hint as to the problem, so I’ll be back on the phone tomorrow to find out what the problem was.

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Thought for the Day:

Sometimes you just have to tell yourself that it’s not worth the jail time.

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