Hello and welcome to the 367th edition of “autostraddle is broken,” starring whiskey kitten and my soul and your achey breaky heart. I am writing this post on a mobile app because I can’t get into the WordPress dashboard, so forgive the choppy talk and lack of kitten photos. The site should be working on your end, we can all read and comment, but we can’t get in to write or publish more posts today and I can’t upload photos. We have decided instead of freaking out about this all day, we will let go, admit defeat re:this day, and instead focus on tomorrow and all subsequent tomorrows!
You may wonder why we are so often broken or running so slow. From what I understand, the answer is that this website was built when we had about 6,000 views a day and now we get 75,000 views a day and have expanded the breadth of the site to include much more than just a bunch of posts – the social networking element is a big drain, for example.
We are running approximately one billion plug-ins. (30, actually.) Imagine a cardboard house with a lot more cardboard taped to itself. That is this website. We just kept adding plugins and making galleries and adding features and so forth. At this point there’s not much our host can do (we pay $900 a month for hosting), it’s on us to rebuild the theme and more effectively code the things, I think? We’re handling a load of features and traffic that usually is only handled by actual companies with salaried employees and full-time paid tech support OR by unfunded but mega popular blogs with very simple coding (eg hyperbole and a half).
We want to be more than we can be, but we didn’t know it was too much until we built it. Today’s problem is somehow related to JavaScript, but most of the problems we’re having are that there are too many queries on each page due to our haphazard expansion.
It’s frustrating and embarrassing and all of those things, and we’re sorry. And we’re taking the rest of the day to get our shit together. Tess is, as per ushe, working her ass off (on top of her full time job running her own business) to fix the javascript issue.
Our next step will most likely involve a kickstarter campaign to help raise funds to get the support we need to rebuild the theme and implement a redesign and make social networking work once and for all. Well, first I’m gonna cry softly in the shower while clutching tinkerbell to my chest (wrapped in a plastic bag to avoid water damage), then we’ll get in to the rest of it.
You should peruse the archives and watch “words with girls”! It’s funny and has cute girls in it.
You guys have always been the most patient, generous readers in the world, and we thank you for bearing with us and hopefully helping us get through this to the other side where you can all read posts underwater and chat with your mom. Right? Okay. I hope this is okay.