If you’ve noticed any service problems in the past few weeks, it’s because I’ve been putting a lot of work into the back end of the site. WordPress is great publishing software, but the bigger the site gets the more unwieldy it is, and one bug in the code or the way the site is configured to work with with the server can cause major headaches. There have been a few of those recently.
Basically, I’ve been overhauling the way data is stored and retrieved so as to avoid putting too much strain on the server. To be honest, it hasn’t been particularly fun, but it’s one of those things you have to do to stay online. Some may ask why I don’t use a wordpress.com or blogger site to avoid these issues. The reason is that these commercial services reserve the right to use your content, so copyright is essentially invalidated. Additionally, they reserve the right to cancel the service with no warning for whatever reason, which could take me offline for a significant period of time.
So, please be patient if a few connection issues remain. I think I resolved them as of yesterday, but I’m not going to curse myself by declaring victory before the results speak for themselves. However, the site is loading more than twice as fast as it was a couple days ago, so I’m hopeful.
Fortunately, even during the recent slowdowns, The Spearhead seems to have been attracting a fair amount of outside attention, which the recent Alexa stats verify. That’s the most important advantage of having a big, comprehensive site: it throws out a wide net and draws people in from all over. The problem is that it means I have to do almost as much work keeping the thing running as I do writing and editing content, so every now and then readers are going to notice a bit of a lull in content as I do my webmaster duties.
