Saturday, September 9, 2017

Keeping Perspective

by Karen McCullough

I’ve run my own web design and development business for the past twelve years, ever since I left the corporate world. It’s been a great ride. Most of my clients have turned into friends and I’ve enjoyed working with them to try to make their sites the best possible for them. I’m now in the process of retiring, due to my age, my husband’s retirement last year, and the fact that I’m traveling more to visit my far-flung family.

But I do still work with my existing clients and have told them that I plan to continue for as long as I’m mentally and physically able.  For the most part it’s a pretty low-key job. My clients send requests and I get them done as quickly as I can.

This past week, though, I had one of those issues that stretch my patience with the job. Or not so much the job as some of the services I have to work with. In this case it was the hosting service for my client.

The client has a Wordpress site I customized for her a while back. She’s done a great job of managing the site on her own, but a couple of weeks ago, a gremlin hit (probably during an attempt to upgrade the Wordpress software) and it brought her site down.

I tend to be compulsive about keeping things running smoothly so I went to work on fixing the problem. And quickly discovered it was going to be a slog. I played whack-a-mole with the errors – fixed one and two more popped up. I finally decided the best option was to restore the site from a recent backup.

Neither I nor the clients had one. I had an old backup from when I did some renovations on the site, but using it would mean losing a lot of data. The clients didn’t have any backups, presuming the hosting service would have them. Most do.

This one didn’t. Or at least claimed they didn’t because that’s a service for which they charge extra.  I called BS on that. They finally admitted they did have backups (of course they did!) but would charge for restoring it. And they wouldn’t restore the site as it was, just dump the files into a backup directory.

It’s an a*****le move from an a******le hosting service.  I’m not listing the name but you can email me for it.  It’s a name you’d recognize.

Anyway, those backup files did provide what I needed to get the site up and running again. The whole thing cost my poor clients a LOT more than it should have to restore their site.

But what I really want to focus on is something one of the clients said to me in a phone conversation as we discussed options for restoring the site. “It’s just a website. No one dies if this website goes down. And if we have to rebuild it from scratch, we can do that.”

It was a wake-up call I needed.  I get so compulsive that I lose site of the bigger picture. Except for some critical services provided on the web, most sites are not really a big deal in the overall scheme of things.  That’s something I need to remember.

I had a similar experience on the writing front recently. I’m in a great anthology called Carolina Crimes: 21Tales of Need, Greed and Dirty Deeds . My story is called "Dead Man’s Hand."

I like the story a lot and I’m proud of it, but it went to press with an error. One that is big and obvious and stupid.  I’m not sure how it got past both me and the editor, but it did and it’s there in black and white. I was completely chagrinned when I realized it.

I was relating this story to another author at the recent Killer Nashville conference.

She asked, “Does it ruin the story?”

I had to admit it didn’t. It didn’t impact the plot at all.

She said, “Don’t worry about it then. Half the readers won’t even notice and the half that do will just shrug and wonder how that got by the editor. It won’t ruin the story for them.”

And you know what? She’s right. That error looks so huge to me, but the first few people who read the story and talked to me about it split pretty evenly between those who didn’t even notice and those who wondered about the question. They all said they still enjoyed the story.

Perspective. It’s a hard thing to keep in mind, but so necessary!

6 comments:

  1. Hi Karen--
    So sorry to hear about the website troubles. I do keep a personal backup, but I need to remember to keep up. Thanks for the reminder. But your message is correct--with all that is going on in the world, a web site is just a web site. And you are also correct to not dwell on the finished book. I've read books from my fav authors and I might notice an error, but I don't care, I just keep reading and enjoy the story.
    Victoria--

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    1. HI Victoria -- Thanks for confirming what others have said. It's hard to recognize that our babies can be flawed!

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  2. Hi, Karen!

    I have also run a website hosting, design & development service for many years. I've recently begun working with Wordpress as a CMS etc and have found it pretty amazing. I also use Dreamweaver. Since Dreamweaver is built offline, there is always a backup on my computer so that's some safety net - I backup those sites fairly often.

    My hosting service also has an automatic backup service but I always backup the Wordpress sites before updating any of the plugins, just in case. Most of my clients are not tech-savvy and one recently had a huge hacking problem - before I took over the job - and would probably have a breakdown if his site went down again. So we back up often.

    But your point about perspective is well said and worth keeping in mind in this line of work. Thank you for the lesson!

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    1. HI Leigh -- I've been working with Wordpress almost exclusively for the last five years or so. I do routinely back up the sites of clients I host, but this was one where they just hired me to set it up and they've maintained it themselves for years.
      BTW: About a year ago I discovered the Updraft Plus backup plugin and I can't recommend it highly enough. It automates the entire process of backing up and restoring a site if the worst happens. I've had to restore a couple of sites after hacks or gremlins using it and it works like a dream.

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  3. And about the book! I published a book in August, went through every word very, very thoroughly and hit the submit button, ordered 10 print copies and eagerly awaited the results. When the copies arrived, right there, on the back cover, I had left out a word! An expensive lesson but I sent the copies out in any case to friends and family. Before any one else bought a copy, I added the missing word -"hide". :D

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  4. Don't you HATE when that happens! I've had books go through three rounds of editing and still have had people find errors in them.

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