Hit it Harder!

Perhaps it is a good sign that the Christmas bauble has continued to be the last entry on the Blip Central Blog.  It suggests a period of relative calm, though we wouldn’t want you to think we’ve had our feet up since then.  The work to keep Blipfoto going is ever present, though as we’ve said previously we are focused primarily on emergency support and maintenance of the site while our volunteers focus on their families and well-being as the additional impact of the pandemic works itself out.
 
We started to notice a few gremlins on the website in the last day or so and they came to a head yesterday evening (UK time).  It was causing problems for members, including uploading entries and being seen in the browse pages.  We needed to do something, so selecting our lightest hammer we took the site down and gave it a bit of a bash.  Our tech gurus stood back to survey their work and realised it needed hitting a bit harder, so out came the small mallet.  By this time it was the early hours of the morning.  The site is now back up but we are still seeing a few errors.  We’ve sent the gurus off to catch up on their sleep but they’ve told us that they are going to have to get out the heaviest mallet and hit the system again.
 
Sometime later today we will take the site down again for this essential maintenance.  There is never a good time to do this and we’d obviously prefer to do it when it causes the minimum of disruption, but with continuing problems it needs to be done sooner rather than later. We’ll have it back up as soon as we can, so please bear with us.  Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible.