When things go wrong in the digital world, they really go wrong. Which is why Dispatches Europe is having issues and will for at least a little bit longer.
The Internet seems so simple … you write a story, you post the story. In fact, a website is made up of a lot of elements that must work in sync. Starting last Friday, we couldn’t access the backend of our Dispatches website to add new posts. Then, no one could access anything as the website locked up. And of course we were on a plane to our annual workation in Turkey when everything went tits up.
Our great developers and troubleshooters on two continents went to work trying to figure out if we had an internal glitch or if Dispatches had been hacked. The hosting dashboard showed that our PHP workers (an application program, not actual humans) were at 100 percent. For the uninitiated, that’s not good, keeping content from loading. That is, you could get to the Dispatches landing page but not open the posts.
PHP – hypertext preprocessor – is a machine language that controls how text works on a website and is especially important in a dynamic environment like a where you’re editing and updating content and trying to maintain a consistent user experience. It’s part of a sandwich that makes websites work that includes HTML, CSS AND MySQL. In addition, PHP enables different APIs to connect to MySQL, the website database. Plus, you’re reliant on a hosting company where their servers store everything.
My point in telling you everything you never wanted to know about websites is that there’s a lot going on .. which can make it difficult to isolate and fix problems.
A tech at our hosting company found that a plug-in was at least past of the issue:
“Object Cache Pro logs performance metrics by default. On large or high-traffic sites, this metric tracking can cause slowdowns or hammer the database or object cache. If you must use the plugin then you can add the following to wp-config.php to disable metrics logging.”
His message was followed by about 50 lines of code, so we’ll spare you that. That plug-in he referenced had to do with writer bios and photos. So, one minor element can wreak havoc.
We think we have everything fixed and you’ll find that Dispatches user experience will actually be better – faster and more responsive. One major issue remaining is restoring those author bios and photos, which will take awhile because we have a lot of new people in Greece, France, Sweden, the United Kingdom and other expat centers.
Most of our technical issues related to our growth in traffic, which is a two-edged sword. It’s important to always be expanding our audience, but then we have to move to more robust technology. We’re already looking at next-gen technology to do what we do, which is basically information delivery.
But for the moment, bear with us and thanks for reading!
Co-CEO of Dispatches Europe. A former military reporter, I'm a serial expat who has lived in France, Turkey, Germany and the Netherlands.
