A Makers Year 63 Its been a while…
O K, so some of you have been asking, whats going on? You start a story and stop halfway through. And you are right, so I will explain.
I left a while ago with the Dubai job nearly ready to go and my Shanghai exhibition getting perilously close. These were my two big milestones when I started this Makers Year blog.
The first thing was comical, or is seems so now. A hand stretch over my laptop that would defy Rachmaninov and ooh £1600 worth of damage, with one tea cup. At the time it wasn’t funny. I have written about it at some length and the very sad amongst you can I hope, find it here.
Next came the delivery to Dubai I will write a separate blog about that as there is fun to be had here. Whilst this is going on we are seeing reduced enquiries from our website . Maybe its seasonal, look later. This I put off for far too long until i did a test on the Contact Us pages and found none of them working. PANIC. Things like this can kill a business in weeks, we had good business at this time so were not that worried but we needed to find out what was going on, and quickly.
Tests and fiddling by people more technical than me told me it was a problem deep inside the server. This sounded expensive and complex. It involved changing the server that housed our website. Thats a bit like an I.T. equivalent of moving house and just as stressful.
This done we had the site functioning but the Blog also moved to the new server at the same time. But it was not now working. Dammit these precious tools, we take so much for granted, they are so sensitive to being monkeyed about with .
After some shouting and arm waving at the techies, we get some sort of blog working. That I hasten to add means Rachel, the admin assistant who, bless her, takes the brunt my upsets and just gets on with it, and Thom who worked a digital artist job for me a couple of years ago but has now moved on to “better things.” We call on Thom when we are both stuck, he is currently helping build us a new website. But that is later.
Working with a clunky blog with no photo library no plug ins so we get 8000 spam comments in twenty minutes is not my idea of fun. So that has stopped me blogging regularly till now. Our blog is a primary tool I put stuff up there two , three times a week when we are rolling. I guess this is the first blog in several weeks of silence.
However I sit here, in a beach house in Viet Nam with the sea lapping at my feet. So blogs on whats happened will flow again. That is if I can get off my backside and write it. Tell me would you work when you have this outside the door? If this sounds a bit smug I apologise, but when I tell you what we had to do to get here you might cut me bit of slack.
