Dashboards, Applications & Business Intelligence

Last week was a shaky week for my blog. For no apparent reason, I saw pages
disappearing, getting database errors and all sorts of UI issues. The website
look and feel kept changing. I would set the template and it stayed that way for a while and all of a sudden
it would switch back to a whole new look, this kept repeating as if a ghost was playing pranks!

Since I work on my day job, I get only early morning or late nights to
look after any issues and since this is a third party hosted website I don’t
have much control over it (not that I have the expertise to handle it on my own
if I had owned the server ;-))

It seemed that I was not even able to ftp any files or update the existing files.
I promptly reported the matter to my web host and the nice guys at Lonex agreed to
move me to a new server. It took few days to get things to normal and I can say
that as of now the website is back on track. Was it really on track?

Then a funny thing happened. I use Google’s web analytics tool to monitor my website.
Knowing that my website is back to normal, I should see my readers coming back, right?
This website, over the period of 4 months has established a small but loyal group of
readers so I expected atleast few of them to return to the website. But it was not the case,
it seemed a week of downtime and the visitors seemed to have abondon me!

“The website Ghost really has some powers” was the thought that kept flashing in my mindspace.

Oh common! How can this be true?? I digged deeper and found out who the culprit was. In order for
Goolge Analytics to work properly, I have to embed some code in each of the web pages.
During the downtime and when I was trying to ftp the files, I had updated the files and missed
this tracking code in the templates. When all the files were copied on to new server obviously
the template was missing the tracking code. I immediately corrected it and the next day was
a big “Sunshine Smile” on my face. Hurraaayyyy! my loyal visitors are back.

Thank you for coming back. Then I keep getting these lovely remarks

”
I just wanted to say how valuable this webiste is. As a new APPS consultant
myself, I turn to this website to learn stuff quickly. Many thanks for doing
this.
–Richard Keeler
”

This just makes my day wonderful!