The site started crawling again Tuesday night (May 2nd), and I sat here astonished, realizing that after all this [website maintenance] if I had to sit through these page load times as a customer (much less my impatient self) I would flat out go somewhere else to buy soap, or salt, or scent, or anything! And for good reason! Okay, so I’m having some fun here, but I’m also serious.
I have been monitoring the web server in real-time and watching, with some interest, the processes that accumulate at different times and under different loads, including the work that I do on the backend.
I finally rebooted the server last night and took some other actions in an attempt to get the site running spry again. These actions were only semi-effective, and I ended up spending a good part of today learning yet more about caching web pages and running a lean site . It’s highly interesting, if it’s what you really like. Unfortunately, I don’t.
So, in what can only be described as the ultimate irony, it appears that the Contact form, in unison with Google’s own anti-spam technology (reCAPTCHA), is the very thing that forced the website back to a crawl. I have instituted a line of JavaScript instead in order to provide you with an email address, while hopefully hiding it from spam robots.
Many may ask, “Why don’t you just post your email address to the website and make it easy?” Well, from personal experience, that’s a disaster. Evil robots harvest it, and no spam filter can adequately deal with it. I am not doing that again.
So, that’s the story with the form on the Contact Us page that has now been decommissioned… at least for now.
Thanks for your time,
John
