It certainly looked that way to me at half past five this morning. If it appeared the same to you, it was a glitch.
I am in the process, with the help of the S&H, of changing website hosts. If you do not know what a website host is, you’re in good company, specifically mine.
As you know I am one of the least tech people you will ever meet. The reason I started the website was to help artists working in miniature. In the nineties and noughties, if you are new here, I was writing for magazines about the Doll’s House hobby. This is still a cracking hobby in that it sets the world to rights without harming anyone, there are so many aspects to it you never get bored or get to the end of it, the people in it are lovely, you can do it on your own or with friends and it involves real proper artists in every discipline you can think of, but in miniature.
It was the artists that attracted me. A lifelong observer of my late father’s antique collecting habits and knowledge, I learned very early in life to distinguish between art and rubbish. The miniature world was the place where I had found most real artists whose work could be purchased by ordinary people with pocket money. I also found the show Miniatura, best in the world because all exhibitors were vetted for quality. I found that by writing for magazines I could help artists. When your output is thumbnail sized, it’s easy to get overlooked even in a miniatures show. A magazine article could explain what was good and how to get hold of it.
The problem was that glossy magazine articles could take up to six months to get published. In that length of time something a collector had seen in a magazine could have been bought and the artist had moved on. Also, as it is in the nature of artists to respond to inspiration, which often strikes at the 23rd hour, the latest and greatest sometimes got sold before it had been reported.
However, with the help of the Internet, I realised, because I already had the ear of collectors and artists, I could help both by publishing all that was new and wonderful just before the show.
Fortunately I had a son who was fascinated by and already working in IT. He asked questions about what sort of website I wanted; I didn’t have a clue. He asked how I wanted it to look; I had no idea. He asked who I wanted to host it and I went: Duh???
I think web hosts are the interface between the site providers and the company using the site. The web hosts can invent all sorts of things to add on and charge for. They are a sort of warehouse of what is available, virtually.
The one I was using kept upping the charges. This is OK if you are running a multimillion dollar business from a website but not so good if you are just a doll maker and miniaturist. So, with the help of the S&H we were changing website provider when the site disappeared altogether. Instead there were severe warnings from Google about how dangerous I was.
I panicked and thought, in the floods of email messages that the change has generated, that I had pressed the wrong button and killed 16 years of work. It’s the only IT skill I possess, pressing the wrong button. If there were an Olympics in it, I’d win. I’d be home and hosed taking the entire Internet with me, while the other competitors were hovering, considering.
There were many panicked emails to the poor S&H, trying to have a lie-in on a Sunday morning.
One of the things he had noticed was an order which had not apparently been fulfilled from the shop. I was horror stricken in case some poor soul had been waiting for an order forever because I had missed a message (my other IT skill) or pressed the wrong button. It was me, trying to get to the bottom of this, that caused me to click on the website at half five in the AM and find it vanished, followed by, so far, eight hours of phone calls and intense activity.
All is well now, I hope. You’ll know before I do, if this gets published. What we take from this is that the Internet is a thing written in the sand. For your own personal use if there is any bit of writing here that you would be sad to miss if the website vanished again, please print it off, or otherwise save it.
I note that several nations are now making provision for protection of undersea Internet cables, so it’s not just me who could make everything vanish by pressing a button.
The other note of which to make a note of is to note the bit at the bottom of every bit of writing which says ‘Leave a comment’. You can click on that and your message will come straight to my inbox. I am real, no one else sees your message but me. If you value our correspondence you might want to make a note of the address when I reply. I actually have a loose leaf file of Internet email addresses, which various family members find hilarious
until their phones go down.
And, of course, you can always find me, and the dolls, at Miniatura, which is not a thing waving around in the ether, although there is some great stuff online, www.miniatura.co.uk but a real hall full of the nicest people there are and the best art, in miniature, that exists in the known and actual world. (Or IRL, as they say, online.)
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