Eastern Bluebird with fresh catch of the day
This is an apology post for anyone that may have visited here in the past, oh I don’t know, 6 months, maybe more – and experienced a slow loading website or some other strange behavior. Basically I have been struggling with site issues since last May to the point where I was about to just say f-it all. These are the things behind running your own site that just suck away time like you wouldn’t believe. And of course, I keep telling myself, I can fix this!
First, it started with the Russians. Doesn’t it always? 🙂 But they sure were interested in my blog, almost as much as the Ukrainians. That resulted in my former host pestering me about resource issues, who were absolutely ZERO help in getting to the bottom of it. So I up the game on my Cloudflare plan and install extra security measures to help reduce that type of thing. Setting up Google and other search engines to not visit so much, blocking others all together. One of these days I’ll send Mr. Putin a bill.
Helped for a little while. But issues started to pop up again, and I started cleaning house on various WordPress plugins. I probably tried to tweak more than I should have. Probably screwed something up along the way. Got up and running smoothly for a little while.
At the end of 2016, my host, Lunarpages, started nagging me again. Something causing resource issues, excess CPU load, blah blah. Since I was not the most awesome site on the internet getting all this real traffic from real people, I concluded it was their sucky servers and jumped ship, with a pre-paid plan left on the table. Now I’m at another host, and the grass did start to seem greener.
Making my site available only to Edward Snowden with kick-ass encryption
That is until stuff like the above happened. Edward Snowden would be proud of me trying to send encrypted data to nature photography spies around the world. My site would get this fancy look for my blog every once in awhile, even on my login page preventing me from even logging into WordPress to find out what was going on. At this point I think I broke something pretty good.
When my site did load properly, it was getting scores of D- to E on page load tests at Pingdom and GTmetrix. Heck, even I didn’t want to visit it. Every operation in my WordPress Admin area was taking forever. So I basically uninstalled just about everything, purged my theme, and reinstalled. And just recently, I was awarded a good GTMetrix score of “A”. Knock on wood.
Hooray!
So again, my apologies if any of your visits were impacted by any of this mess. Heck, maybe you aren’t even a visitor anymore. I suppose I can always call upon my friends in Russia if it gets too lonely.
Great to see one of your images, as always!
Sorry to read about your hassles with your site. It’s just amazing how much of your time issues like these can take. For me, the hassles have been with cloud backups from my semi-supported synology NAS.
I have had issues posting here, last time I tried the post didn’t submit successfully.
Hi Tom,
Well, thank you for coming back! 🙂 Yes, it does suck up a lot of time. I imagine if I really knew what I was doing and wasn’t such a wordpress/code hack, it would be easier to figure some of these things out. Experience by trial and error has been my basic operating mode ever since putting my own site up.
Great to see one of your images, as always!
Sorry to read about your hassles with your site. It’s just amazing how much of your time issues like these can take. For me, the hassles have been with cloud backups from my semi-supported synology NAS.
I have had issues posting here, last time I tried the post didn’t submit successfully.
Well, things seem fine to me but then again it could be the me part. I must admit I visit your site through my Feedly feed and did not notice any problems.
I have kept my site as simple as possible because I’m not one to play around with code or too many plug-ins. Glad you’ve got things back to a workable place for you.
Glad to read that you didn’t notice any issues.
The response time is much better Mark but I did get an error when I tried to use the link from my web site. I might need to update my link because when I went to grafphoto.com and then this blog it all worked perfectly. I’ll check my link. I’d hate for you to miss all the valid traffic that link provides! 😉
I’ve had some episodes with my site, CPU time usage and my hosts as well…weird search engines and all. Anyway, good work!
Glad to hear it is working for you also Brooks. The link from your site to mine seemed to work ok, but maybe you fixed it already? Don’t send me too much ok? I’ve had enough issues.
I did fixed the link immediately after commenting here. I think the only difference was adding a “/” at the end of the url in my link. Let me know if this results in too much traffic and I’ll turn down the spicket/tap. 🙂
Well, I hope that you’ve gotten to the bottom of it! That can be terribly frustrating, but I suppose that’s life at the top! 😉
No snarkiness allowed here Sir. 🙂
I know it can be very frustrating, that’s why I ended up abandoning my old self run site and ended up with Squarespace. I know it’s not quite as good in terms of several things but I was just getting so much spam that I couldn’t take it anymore. You would think people would have better things to do.
By the way, I got the email notification of this post, but looking back I’m not at all sure I got the last two.
Lack of email notification is likely the result of my disabling of plugins. I turned off Jetpack for awhile, which sends those notifications.
Well I’m glad you are up and running again. I always enjoy your posts!