Friday evening I had my first hiccough with the new website. While I have had a blog on and off for several years, this is the first time that I have dabbled with my own domain name. Following the advice of many pro bloggers I decided to use wordpress.org as my blogging design platform which means my blog is hosted elsewhere and having my blog hosted elsewhere is possibly what saved it.

It would be a dream come true to set up a travel website which generates a reasonable income so I am slowly adding features to turn it into more of a dynamic and beautiful website rather than a static blog. As it stands google analytics tells me that aside from my random (but regular) reader in Saint Petersburg, Russia – Hello to you! – I could tell you the names of almost every other visitor based on their location. So, while I do have a small circle of supportive friends and family, the dream of travelling and writing for a living is a long way off yet.

Friday evening after a successful but tiring day with Kindergarten kids on a field trip, I came home and decided to play around with some design elements on the blog. Feeling over-confident in my abilities to edit the html code after some recent minor successes in that department I decided to create a php fuction to change up my homepage. That is when my website came face to face with the white screen of death.

All in all my website was down for over an hour. Powerless to revive my online baby, I took to google to diagnose the issue. The prognosis wasn’t good and I was even locked out of the administrative panel so couldn’t even attempt to save it. With a bit of tweaking and theme changing via my rarely-used host account I was able to get it back online but spent another 3 hours recreating the exact page designs and functions I had previously installed. After a few tears and a few hours I was right back where I started from and have still not managed to create quite the website I had envisioned. It’s a work in progress and for now it can stay that way.