Back in the Saddle

After EIGHT long days, I’m pleased to report that [chrisbrogan.com] is back up and running. It’s a long story as to what went wrong. At first, I blamed my original hosting provider, because they upgraded their servers, their software, and several pieces in between, but after some help, it looks more like I had a runaway plugin or some other corruption that crushed my site.

Thanks

Special thanks to Andy Quayle of TechBurgh for being a first responder, and for giving me a hosting spot within moments. I didn’t end up using it, but Andy, who is amongst other things a first responder for medical situations, was a first responder here, too.

Around this same time, KEITH Casey from Casey Software and Why Go Solo made a little holding file for all my front end blog files. Thank you so much for that, Keith!

Thanks to Aaron Brazell of Technosailor for taking apart my website, piece by piece, digging in deep to the SQL, and finding the problem. Without Aaron, I would’ve continued fighting my former hosting provider instead of finding the problem. Aaron also offered my site a home, and I’m grateful for that.

Finally, thanks to Justin and Eric Rasmussen of GimpTV. The two of them worked their heads off and set me up with new hosting, walked me through the parts of shifting my domain around that I didn’t understand, and performed HOURS of free labor (well, they haven’t submitted a bill yet) to help me get all settled into my new place. I met these guys, and their other partner, Michael Murray, two years ago at the PME, and even then, I suspected they were decent people. Turns out they’ve helped me many times over the years, in many odd ways, delivering key help at exactly the right time.

Without Andy, Aaron, Justin, and Eric, I’d still be stuffed up on Tumblr and there’d be no website. By the way, TWO different opportunities were almost blown by my not having my good site up and running, which has sold me once and for all on the value of a good design with lots of readily accessible contact info.

Thank you, everyone. As with most things in my life, a community effort saved the day.

If you enjoyed this post, please consider leaving a comment or subscribing to the feed to have future articles delivered to your feed reader.

ChrisBrogan.com runs on the Thesis Theme for WordPress

Thesis is the search engine optimized WordPress theme of choice for serious online publishers. If you’re a blogger who doesn’t understand a lot of PHP, Thesis will give a ton of functionality without having to alter any code. For the advanced, Thesis has incredible customization possibilities via Thesis hooks.

With so many design options, you can use the template over and over and never have it look like the same site. The theme is robust and flexible enough not only to accommodate a site like ChrisBrogan.com, but also to enable the site to run far more efficiently than it ever has before.

• Go on a guided video tour of Thesis and see the amazing things you can do with this theme! Seriously, you’ll love it.
• Check out the Thesis demo site
• See more Thesis-based sites in the gallery showcase