I had some trouble with my website last week – the kind of trouble that prevented me from accessing my dashboard. Luckily this happened AFTER I’d put up my blog post for the week, and the problem was on the admin end so it was mostly invisible to everyone but me, though many of you may have seen wacky error messages before being forwarded on to the correct page.

I am NOT very tech savvy. I know enough basic coding to be dangerous to myself, but when it comes to trouble shooting I’m nearly helpless. To be honest, I approached the idea of having a website at all with more than a little anxiety: I know I need one to help promote my career–such as it is– as an author, but I don’t know how to deal with technical issues, and so I rely on my hosting service’s tech support. They’re basically only open 9AM-5PM Monday through Friday, though they’re on the west coast of the US, so that makes their functional hours for me 11AM-7PM. Of course the issue happened late on a Thursday, so I tried contacting them on Friday, but wasn’t able to get through because of “unusually heavy call volume.” They are updating their software, and the drop-dead date to get this done is March 31. When I performed the upgrade, something else broke, leaving my website still functional for visitors, but me stewing all weekend over not being able to access my controls and metrics.

I was finally able to get through on Monday, and the tech, who sounded thoroughly bored, helped walk me through my issues and get things righted again. I’m still not certain everything is fixed, so they can probably expect another flustered phone call a few weeks or months down the road. For now, I’m happy I’m back up and running.

*****

A project I worked on almost two years ago–Madison By Night for Vampire: the Masquerade’s community content program, the Storyteller’s Vault–got a positive review just recently. You can listen to the podcast here:

https://utilitymuffinlabs.com/utility-muffin-podcast/2019/3/19/769sv0gs4x2iurefy9yk8mkumrinpshttps://utilitymuffinlabs.com/utility-muffin-podcast/2019/3/19/769sv0gs4x2iurefy9yk8mkumrinps

If you only want to listen to the review part (they do ramble quite a bit), skip ahead to the 38:00 mark. They have some totally valid criticisms, though a I could quibble with a couple of minor points. Still, it’s great to see that someone has actually read something I wrote; as an author, feedback is a scarce commodity, and positive reviews give me a much-needed boost.