More Blogkeeping

This site was down for several hours this morning. As I mentioned, I've changed hosting companies and there was one misconfiguration that took us offline. The folks at Chunkhost promptly fixed it and if you can read this, all is well.

If you can't read this…well, what I'm about to say won't matter but here's the reason a few people can't read this site on its new server at the moment. There is this thing on the Internet called a DNS. It stands for Domain Name Server. Websites are not really located at addresses that have easy-to-remember names in words, usually ending with ".com" or ".net." They're located at numerical addresses. When you type in or try to go to an address like www.newsfromme.com, your request goes through a Domain Name Server somewhere which translates words into numbers and sends you to the appropriate numbers-only address.

When I moved this site to a new hosting company, its numerical address changed. We sent out the electronic equivalent of a Change of Address card. It goes to all the Domain Name Servers and in this case, told them to change all requests for newsfromme.com from the old numerical address to the new numerical address. If you can read this, your DNS got the message.

However, some Domain Name Servers are slower than others to update and some of them inexplicably revert. That happened with me this morning and it's unrelated to the other problem we had. Time-Warner Cable can't get my e-mail to me promptly and now their Domain Name Server is confused. Sometimes, when I go to my own site this morning, everything is fine and sometimes, it sends me to the old address, which is no longer functional. This should all resolve itself shortly. And like I said, if you're reading this, it doesn't matter. Your DNS is working properly.