Last night when I got home, I went to try to write a little post to this blog, and it simply didn't load. And didn't load, and didn't load. The effort to load "typepad.com", "sixapart.com" and "blogs.com" all would time out.
I've been having some bandwidth issues with respect to outside-of-Korea websites, but that didn't seem to be the problem, as everything else I tried worked fine, including my U.S.-based bank and several other blog services I surfed to, out of curiosity. So, typepad was "down" in some way.
I've manged to post a blog entry of some kind EVERY SINGLE DAY this year. I'm weirdly proud of that, although it's kind of an artificial constraint, and I could easily cheat, since I can manually change the "post date" if I wanted to. But so far, I've actually met that "every day" criterion with no cheating of any kind, this year. So, I felt horrible that I would miss a post because of technical difficulties. Finally, I sent a scream of annoyance from my cellphone (which is the "No Title" post just previous), having figured out it was just barely possible to do that a few weeks back.
Right. Except now, this morning, when I went back in to check, typepad was still down. And only now, sitting at work around noon, is it available. Yet the typepad support area and status area mentions absolutely ZERO about any kind outage or crash, although there's a vague "4:15 PM ET: The TypePad application should now be working without any problems for all users."
What gives? Was it only because I was sitting in Korea that I was unable to access the site? Was it only because I was sitting at home? I will have to keep poking around, but, I'm annoyed.
I'm not so much annoyed that there was an outage… that's not a big deal, these things happen, after all. I'm annoyed that I can't figure out why there was an outage, or what kind of outage it was. Was it a general outage? A total outage? An only-because-I'm-trying-to-access-from-Korea outage? An only-because-my-home-DSL-provider-sucks outage? I want answers!
Interestingly, the "scream-from-cellphone" post appears to have worked. Which strikes me as odd, if typepad were truly completely down. It lends to credence to the possibility that it was a "because-I'm-in-Korea" type problem.
Sigh. Whatever. Hopefully, it will work tonight when I get home, and I can post normally again. And I'll probably forget how annoyed I feel and move on. But it does get me thinking… perhaps I should "snapshot" my blog (capture all the posts) and back it up somewhere, just in case there is a real, truly horrible loss of data or service.
If I had to end my relationship with typepad at some point, either due to a failure on their part or because I just became too annoyed with them, I'd need all my old posts to migrate to a different location. In theory, I'm sufficiently competent with HTML etc. that I could in essence "manually" host my blog, at least for a short term, on my own underutilized server. But only if I have good backups, right? Uh oh… this is starting to sound like a weekend-eating project. Jeez, and I never finished killing Ubuntu, two weekends ago. That was my last project. Sigh.