More technical difficulties
I was notified on April 3 that the Zavelogue was
not functioning properly. It should be working fine now. The story of what went
wrong and why it took a week to fix which is the subject of this
entry.
In the airport in Chennai last Saturday (April
1), I noticed that my laptop was picking up a wireless network. I tried posting
the last few entries from our time in Calcutta, only to realize that the
wireless network was not free. In true Indian fashion, the Tata Indicom wireless
network website had a full explanation of the procedure for purchasing a
wireless networking pass, but failed to mention where the pass could be
purchased. Websites for Indian goods and services just aren't at the stage yet
of taking credit card info online. I searched the airport to no
avail.
The reason this matters is that
when I had tried to post the Calcutta entries, the blogging software created a
new index page (the page you first see when you arrive at the Zavelogue) and
some new folders to store the entries. Since they never got posted, the next
time I logged on and tried to upload some entries, the index page pointed to a
location for the entries that did not exist (which is why you could see the
entry abstracts, but got an error page when clicking on the "Read More"
link).
Well, when we arrived in Kodai
and I read my email and learned from a couple readers that there was a problem,
I figured I'd fix it with no problem, since this happened once before and I now
know how to fix it. Where things went terribly wrong is that fixing the problem
requires me to essentially erase the whole blog from the server and then have
the software recreate and re-post the whole thing. Since it is now a pretty big
blog, with many images, this process takes some time (even on a highspeed
connection).
At the Internet cafe I
first visited in Kodai, I assumed I was on a highspeed connection. Only when the
re-posting process dragged on and on, and other users in the cafe began
complaining about the slowness of the connection, did I learn we were all
sharing a single dial-up connection. When I cancelled in the middle of the
process, I really screwed things up. So as of about Tuesday, readers might have
gotten an error page when trying to reach the Zavelogue home
page.
I tried the other two Internet
places in town, but they were also both using dial-up connections. Then I
learned that broadband Internet has not yet reached Kodai. The whole time we've
been in Kodai, the blog has been sitting in cyberspace broken. If you are
reading this now, then everything is functioning properly again, but only
because I waited until returning to Cochin and visiting my new favorite
sweltering box of an Internet cafe.
Posted: Fri - April 7, 2006 at 04:07 AM