Do You Yanoo?

Dr. G has come back into my life. He had a huge web design edit which I spent a good part of yesterday doing. In truth, I would love to teach his staff how to do this stuff, but that doesn't seem likely to happen. So whenever he needs changes, I charge him big bucks (though people tell me I'm not charging him enough), work a couple of hours and pad my bank account.

I got most of his corrections made and posted to his web site. When I originally set it up, it was on Yahoo, just like Funny the World is, so I was logged into Yahoo under his log in and password.

When I got ready to post my own journal entry last night, I went to log out as Dr. G and log in as me and couldn't do it. It wouldn't let me connect to the log in page.

That was strange, I thought. I even tried going to Internet Explorer and logging in from that browser, thinking this might be a Firefox problem. But I had no better luck there.

I tried connecting to yahoo.com and received a message that the site didn't exist.

Yahoo didn't exist? Oh my...NOW what's going to happen?

I sent a message out on Twitter asking if others were having problems. I only received one response, but she said she'd been having problems with the site all day, so that made me feel a little better.

I sent out a note to my notify list saying that I couldn't post to Yahoo. And I went to sleep, confident that the Great Gods of Yahoo would have the problem all fixed by morning.

I guess my subconscious worried about it all night because I awoke at 5 a.m. with a headache and wondering if Yahoo was back. I tried to go back to sleep, but couldn't, so I got up to check. No. Yahoo was not back. I checked Google for "Yahoo" and expected to see huge news stories about Yahoo servers crashing, but there was no news whatsoever. And all the links led to yahoo, none of which worked.

I'm intelligent enough to realize that something is wrong with the yahoo servers, but I continue to hope that somehow I'll find a workaround.

This is the first day that I've been home and haven't posted a journal entry since I started this journal nearly nine years ago. There have been a few days when I didn't post entries, but it was usually when I was on a boat in the middle of the Thames or somewhere in the Australian outback, or somewhere else without internet access.

When I first started my journal, it was Geocities and Geocities was so cutesy that when you joined, you chose a "neighborhood" and then it gave you a map with available "homes" to choose. You could pick which person you wanted to be your neighbor. It was all very graphic-designed.

It wasn't long before it just became Geocities without all the map and the houses and you just posted directly to the server, which I've been doing now for nearly nine years. In all that time this is the very first time I haven't been able to post. I've heard of other people who have had problems, but it has been completely reliable for me. Until today.

Early in the life of this journal, I heard horror stories of people whose servers went down and they lost their entire journaling history. At that time I started keeping a backup. I went back to the very first entry and backed the entire journal up to the present, so if something catastrophic happens to Yahoo and, god forbid, it loses all its files, at least I have them.

I know that it will be back up--eventually--and that it's just a matter of being patient and waiting until they fix this...whatever it is...that is wrong with Yahoo today, but it's damn frustrating.

Of course there are always alternatives, and a year or so ago, I started a mirror site on Blogger. I did it because of people who wanted to follow me, but because of the way I structure Funny the World, I can't have an RSS feed on it. So every day I post the same entry on Blogger and I can post THIS entry on Blogger so that I don't miss a day.

But I want my Yahoo back!!!

I posted a note to Facebook to see if others were having problems and two people responded that Yahoo came up just fine for them, so I tried rebooting my computer to see if it might be something on MY computer, but it still comes back with a "page not found." Now I'm REALLY flummoxed.