Today James' Blog experienced some downtime today, about 12 hours worth, which is quite alot, but strangely this was not because of a server going down. No it was a strange incident involving one of the key systems that powers WordPress (The engine that runs James' Blog) and that is MySQL. If you had visited the site today then you would of either got just a forever loading page or if you had viewed the site after a few hours you would of got the temp page I set up, which redirected all links to the temp page. Because the website wasn't offline just a key system wasn't functioning correctly which like I said was MySQL, it handles all of the databases connections and because access to the database couldn't be established nothing was able to be displayed.
My host got in touch with me after having communication difficulties of there own and basically this was the problem:
"There was first an issue with MySQL which i corrected, but then outbound requests would not resolve hostnames. This highlighted an issue with DNS, which I have now resolved. Two, probably unrelated issues happening consecutively..."
In basic terms the service MySQL could not process connections correctly and the DNS (Which is mainly the domain name which is james-blogs.com) had difficultly to. Probably just bad timing like Dan (The Tech support rep said in the statement above) but everything is fixed now and also my host have put in some new measures to stop this from happening ever again which is good! But to be fair since moving to LRC-Hosting 10 months ago, this has been the only downtime besides when they moved there network around (Which was planned)
Anyway James' Blog is back online again, sorry for the downtime and now I shall reply to some of your comments that people have been leaving on articles and tutorials.
I apologize for the alliteration, but that's what I've been doing for the past couple of days. I've been planning a couple of tweaks to my one and only WordPress theme for a while, but have only got round to it recently, this is due to me being on holiday and before the exams I took last month. But whats good is that the exams are over and while I'd wish I was back in Scotland because that would mean I wouldn't be going back to sixth form tommorow, but im back in England so there we go. Anyway I like to do a what I call blog update post any once in a while to update you on the latest changes that happen behind the scenes so to speak. Read on to get the latest information
A couple of days ago I posted about a bandwidth issues, that had recently been happening. If you didn't read the post click here Bandwidth amount is no longer a problem as I have just bumped my account to 80GB per month, and you'd think wow your not crazy, thats exactly what I think too, but im still using about 4 GB per day, well it's usually around 3.94 GB and does vary slightly, but the usage is very much high.
For the first time in History, As a webmaster I've managed to exceed my bandwidth limit causing James' Blog to go down for a bit. I think from around 12:10 AM this morning I'd gone over my bandwidth usage and if you we're unlucky enough to try and view the blog, you would have got a nice suspended message, saying that the hosting account of James' Blog is suspended. It wasn't exactly the best thing to wake up to this morning, but your now reading this message so you'll be happy to now that my hosting account is unsuspended. Thanks to the great people at LRC-Gaming (Who hosts James' Blog) they we're kind enough to let me purchase some more bandwidth without having to upgrade my hosting package.
It's been a while since I last updated the blog with anything, but here is something to break the silence! Look on the navigation bar and to the right, what do you see? Nothing? If so refresh your browser and clear your cache, because you should be seeing a Change colour option along with five different colours to choose from! Back tracking to the beginning of 2009 when the WordPress theme you see before you was first released onto the blog, it had a blue colour scheme, and still does today, but a couple of days ago I go thinking, what if someone who visits James' Blog doesn't like the colour blue, what if they liked green instead. Well with a neat script from Dynamic Drive I've managed to implement a colour change script that will change the colour of certain attributes, such as the header or sidebar title bars.
You may have noticed that I haven't been active in the March month as much as I'd hoped. The main reason behind this is because of exams that are approaching in about a months time and im finding myself not having time to post on my blog and generally my internet activities (That probably sounds wrong) but yeah I thought I'd post this to announce that im still here. Infact If you've noticed im still here reply to people posting comments on my various articles but just can't find the time to post new content.
Like I said, I have exams coming up in about a months time, so im finding myself revising alot which is really cutting into various things like gaming and blogging. God I hate revision, It's really annoying don't we all just love it. But yeah thats one of the main reasons why I haven't been posting much recently.
Another reason is because I also have a unofficial job going on. Because im a bit of a gamer I play all sorts of FPS games, and one of the main ones I play is Counter Strike Source, about a year ago and friend and I invested in a Counter Strike Source server. It's a 16 slots server which over the months has got quite popular, and as admin, I make sure the server runs smoothly, not only that but I am the server operator so I control the server both in game via FTP and admin panel. Because of the server becoming popular I've been talking to regular players and the've been giving me feedback on performance and other factors of the server and I've been fine tuning and performance maintainance. I've been working on the server alot lately but it's been worth it. The server is now performing better than ever and players have reported good feedback on my changes.
Generally busy really, so im finding hard to post new stuff on my blog but I've got some exciting new articles planned in the upcoming future so watch this space! Don't worry though im still here. Im still managing (Just) to check my emails and respond to all your lovely people leaving me comments on articles and posts!
» Recent Comments/Trackbacks