What Happened to By’s Musings?

What happened to By’s Musings?” and “What went wrong?” are two questions that have been bugging me for eight months. In late December 2017, my blog and website both crashed.

I discovered the damage just after New Year’s when I attempted to go to the login page of my site to compose a draft of a new post. I got the dreaded 404 Error Message: The requested page is not available. I felt like screaming at the computer screen: What do mean “NOT AVAILABLE”? I used this page two weeks ago. 

I hadn’t checked my blog or site for two weeks because it was the Christmas and New Year’s Break. How could the site be unavailable for only three people, me, my webmaster and his assistant are supposed to have access to it.

I immediately called my webmaster, he said he would check it out and get back to me. When he did respond, his initial assessment was not encouraging.

Everything on the website and blog that had been done between June 17, 2017, and December 17, 2017 had been wiped out. It had all vanished into Cyber La La Land. The electronic gremlins which inflicted this damage had also destroyed all links and formatting on everything done prior to June 17, 2017. This meant that nothing on my website or blog was working properly, or at least in the manner that I had intended it to work.

My webmaster sensing my deep frustration and mounting desperation immediately tried to console me with the soothing words, “But we have backups of everything.”

My webmaster and I are both backup fanatics. I have more than 50 years of files on two external hard drives and another copy stored at an offsite location through a backup service. My webmaster has a whole row of backup drives servicing his web clients. I even kept paper copies of all of my previous blog posts, just in case.

I felt a little more secure until the next domino dropped. My webmaster tried reloading my posts and pages from his backups. But Murphy’s Law struck again. They wouldn’t load correctly. Nothing that was done after June 17, 2017, would load at all. For posts and pages done before June 17, 2017, the only thing that would load was the text. Most of the illustrations, pictures, or links would not load properly. What were we to do now?

Further investigation indicated that software updates to three separate components of this project were all done at essentially the same time, possibly creating mass confusion and conflict. In addition, we found that the formatting and loading processes that we used in the early posts were now incompatible with the new software.

We came to the agonizing conclusion that the only way to rectify the problem was to essentially reconstruct the website and blog posts one at a time and to relaunch a new and improved version of By’s Musings and the Higher Ed By Baylis (HEBB) website. Some of those hard copies were going to come in handy after all.

As we prepared to do this relaunch, we came to the obvious conclusion that this would be the best time to update and redesign them. Thus, we are getting ready to roll out several new features on both the blog and the website. 

I will highlight those new features in my next post which I plan to publish on Friday, September 14. 

To whet your appetite for what’s coming, I will just say that the new site and blog will integrate more social media aspects and will be more interactive. 

Please stayed tuned for what I believe will be an exciting ride. One of the basic tenets of my philosophy of education is that education is both an individual and a social activity. It’s like a pot-luck dinner, where each participant brings something of value to the table. I trust you will enjoy the travels and the bountiful buffet. Give of yourself to help others, while helping yourself to the tantalizing offerings of others. I hope you will contribute your knowledge, expertise, and skills. Participate fully to the benefit of all of us. Bon appetit.