Over the Rainbow…

I did it.  My tech crew and I did it.  This has been an issue for so long I can’t remember when I didn’t have tech issues.  I had a lovely old fashion cry this afternoon, I haven’t done that in a long time.

Last Monday Pair Networks took on the job of moving my sites, both weaversew.com and daryllancaster.com, which are linked, to their hosting services.  I’ve needed to move off the hosting company I had for a long time but couldn’t until all the other items were in place.  Which they finally were.  I’ve been emailing back and forth between my personal tech support and their moving team, trying to figure out what they are talking about when they ask specific questions and very proud of my self when I figured it out and answered them.  All by myself!

Yesterday they had copied all the files from the website, the blog and the store and made up a dummy site that I could check before everything went live.  The website was pretty easy to run through, and the store as well.  There isn’t that much on them.  Links seemed to work, and photos for the most part went where they were supposed to go.  I did find a couple of errors that I never caught initially which I made a note to fix.  I also noted that my prospectuses needed serious updates.  They aren’t incorrect, they just aren’t current.  Add that to the list.  

But the blog.  My lovely life story.  I have almost 800 posts spanning just about 10 years.  There have been 46,000 comments and lots of views.  There is a counter at the bottom of each post to show how many people view a post.  Recent posts always give me a little thrill when the count goes over 1,000.  Which it eventually does.  I have about 600 subscribers, but a lot of people just view my posts on an RSS feed.  Occasionally I’ll get spikes in posts like the one from Cuba, where people share it with friends since it has nothing to do with weaving.  

I clicked on and skimmed over a little less than 800 posts over the last day and a half.  It was gut wrenching when I saw the ones where my husband passed, and the ones where we said goodbye to my son when he went off to boot camp, there is a lot of history there.  I often search my blog when I can’t remember when I did something or what I saw when I was there.  Like last night.  I watched the final episode of Project Runway All Stars, which is the only show I watch on TV, I adore it, and last night was no different.  I was rooting for all three finalists.  But one of the episodes this season took place at the Jewish Museum in Manhattan where the contestants toured an exhibit about Isaac Mizrahi.  I did a head scratch because I went to that exhibit.  It was fantastic.  But that exhibit ran between March and August 2016.  In fact I went to the exhibit 6 weeks after my husband died.  Which means that series of PR All Stars was shot in 2016.  I knew that because I did a blog search and there it was.

Anyway, as I went further back in the blog I started seeing some pretty respectable numbers of page views, most were in the 5,000 range.  I was blown away that anybody cared about what I did back in 2013.  Then I hit a couple that had 70,000 page views!

I kept going back and hit this one and nearly collapsed on the floor.  

Yeah, 123,000 pages views.  I’m going to guess that because I had keywords and people did searches that the site popped up.  They might not have actually stuck around and read the post, but for a brief moment let me bask in the love that 123,000 people saw my page.

Note to self, always add keywords to the metadata of each post…

It was almost anticlimactic when I saw this one at only 110,000 views.

So the move is finished.  I had my office assistant place a store order and all was working there.  And I got the FTP transfer information from Pair and by myself, all by myself, I changed the settings in Dreamweaver so I can just click on the little “put” arrow and any changes to my web pages and content will actually happen.  The speed was so fast I wasn’t sure anything actually happened.  But it did, and I burst into tears.  I did it.  Kevin, I did it.  I hope you are watching.  You said I’d figure it out, and with a lot of expensive help, I actually did it.  The final test of course is if this blog post gets to all of you, that it loads quickly without timing out, and that you all get your notifications.  The I’ll go off and have a well deserved celebratory glass of wine and pack for a lecture tomorrow in South Jersey. (In fact it did not go as planned, I couldn’t load images, I had to tweak some more things, talk to Pair tech support, and I’m going to try this again…)

Meanwhile…

I finished the jacket I started last week.  All of the handwork is done now, the photo still has pins everywhere.  I love this jacket.  I love the fabric  and can’t wait to weave more.  I searched my blog for a photo of the original yarn when I bought it on Bainbridge Island, WA back in 2016, I had only purchased two skeins, the ones on the left, but the dog ate one of them forcing me to purchase two more at full price from Yarn Barn of Kansas.  I was lucky.  I have four of a different colorway and I can’t wait to warp up a loom to use those skeins.  The yarn is Noro Taiyo Lace.  The warp was a 2 ply shetland, mill end from WEBS.

And I looked longingly at my shelves of stash, which my studio assistant has spent the better part of the last week organizing, refolding fabrics to keep the edges from fading in the light, and generally moving things around.  She pulled the bulky Krokbragd sampler I wove last spring in a Tom Knisley workshop with the Jockey Hollow Weavers Guild, and asked me where it should go.  I looked at it, re-looked at it and then did this…

I love this tote.   I love that I have things that make me happy and make me proud and make me just smile because life can be pretty dreary and depressing what with those proverbial handbaskets we are all traveling in and a spring that has seriously failed to launch…  (There was another dusting of snow this morning). All of my outdoor waterlines froze and ruptured over the winter, yes I drained them and blew air through them.  They all still ruptured.  The ponds are in terrible shape, the pumps are shot and if they do manage to go on, they blow the circuits in the house.  There is a lot of money going to be poured into the exterior again this spring. 

But for today, just for today, I did it.  I crossed over that rainbow into hopefully a smother future technologically and that Pair Networks will be way more reliable and responsive and the upgraded speed will be felt all around.

I love you all, thanks for your patience…  Stay tuned…