I will start this post by asking a couple of questions:

1. Are you using Google’s Custom Search Site or AdSense for Search for your web site?
2. Are you sure it’s returning ALL of your pages or content related to a particular search?
3. Are you absolutely sure?

Okay, that’s 3 questions actually, but nevermind the details.

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I made a silly mistake setting up the Google Analytics account for this web site, and I only recently figured it out.

If you manage a web log here at GIDBlog, then you know you can view the stats for this site via Google Analytics. Anyway, for quite some time, there seemed to be no traffic to any of the blogs except one, at least according to the reports available at Google Analytics.

What happened was that I had somehow entered a include pattern filter — I guess I was trying to figure things out and forgot to remove the setting — which resulted in only stats to just one blog being reported, ignoring all others.

Since yesterday, I removed this ‘filter’ and from now on, the reports should be accurate.

Sometime between yesterday and the day before, something changed and it caused all the sites being hosted here, including GIDForums, to load very slowly. I am very sorry if this “error” caused you some inconvenience. I’ll try to explain what happened.

The first thing I noticed was that accessing GIDForums.com was unusually slow for me. Though distressed, I didn’t panic because I assumed it was just my lousy ISP again, as it is usually the case.

Then I noticed that the popular gzip testing tool was failing, the log file reported that the script wasn’t able to access any of the web sites the users were checking the whole day! Now I panicked…

It took me nearly half a day, but at least I managed to get one issue resolved: the web host had changed nameservers over the weekend, and the nameserver IP addresses I was still using for this server was of course now no longer valid. I made the changes as soon as I was informed, and at least the gzip testing tool was working again, but now it was working unusually slow, just like everything else.

Another few hours and many emails later, Aaron (my web host), suggested I restart the server. The server had been up for 308 days until yesterday, so I agreed it was a good idea. We did that, but nothing, everything was still so slow.

Then in one email he said, “I’ve run some tests and while it doesn’t appear to be the switch I’d still like to move your server.” I wasn’t going to say no, I was just glad we were doing something at this point!

Well, despite the move, there was not much improvement and we had to leave it at that. Now some 24 hours later, all the sites seem to be back to normal and no longer slow for me, I hope it is not for you either.

By the way, it was a Sunday evening where Aaron was at the time. Even so, he went all the way to the datacenter, after his supper, to help me with the reboot and the ’switch’ move, and to see if he could resolve this issue for me — what a guy!

Today, I think I know what the real problem was, but until I hear from Aaron again, I won’t be able to comment on it yet.

Tonight, I will start to work on GIDForums.com and have every page there linking to the most recent blog posts here. > more <