Other Monthly Reviews
One-Week Outage
For the first time ever XBOP suffered four outages over a one week period. Since there were three very brief moments of service restoration, that register as single digit visitors (24, 26 and 27 April) I have aggregated them all into a simplified one-week outage period. It should also be noted that these outages here are specific to the Jetpack plugin ability to track and record statistics for XBOP. For part of the one-week period, I had disabled Jetpack and so XBOP was live but flying blind in terms of statistical records.
The reason for the outages was a compatibility issue between WordPress 4.5 and the plugin Jetpack 4.0. With Jetpack rolling out a fix in version 4.0.2, which was finally rolled out for XBOP around April 28-9, we resume services as per usual.
It is always a delicate balance when considering software updates. In my three year experience at XBOP with WordPress (and Jetpack) I have never had any problems. If anything the practice of keeping XBOP fully up-to-date has been quite proactive. Within a day or so of a publicly released update, I implement it.
The change control practices at XBOP may need to be reviewed as a result of this most recent update and subsequent outage. Should I perhaps delay rolling out at update by a week? Perhaps adding an intentional lag into my schedule will help to allow other websites to be the first Guinea pigs? The other consideration/learning for XBOP is within our control – implementing a change should utilize the upload approach instead of the automated “click button” approach. This approach will ensure that I download the update files and always have an offline ability to reverse the change. If a new version was buggy, as was the case recently, I could have rolled back the update and restored the previous stable version… The other option is to do nothing differently and trust that the developers of WordPress & Jetpack will deliver quality.
Analytical Summary
The effect of our one week outage is clearly seen across all metrics and our ability to capture data. All 3-monthly averages are negative with the one exception being the views/visitor metric. It is hard to gauge how much traffic was lost during the outage and pure speculation on what April might have reported in the hypothetical situation that there was no outage. Could April have beaten March? We just will never know now.
We can however hope that May will provide a more positive note and help restore confidence all around. With today (1 May) being my church’s album launch, a whole raft of new content is pending…
Posting Activity
April has seen the drought of content persist. The one post at the start of the month was the last Monthly Review, so does that really count?
The outage in late April also has not helped, although it did trigger me to post the apology and thus, reawaken and re-motivate myself to posting again. The final posts of April were focused on Operation Christmas Child, and behind the scenes, other work hanging off XBOP remains yet to be revealed.
I reiterate my commitment to completing the entire series that has just commenced in reviewing the Family Christmas Cruise that took place in December 2015. Higher Than I launches today, so a big backlog of content needs to be cleared – the 2016 bible verses focus on My Identity in Christ is also part of this pipeline, together with a potential showcasing of photographers and their work. This last idea is pending negotiations with my brother, but also has the potential for wider application where XBOP showcases and celebrates the different fields/industries of professionals all within my social network. Other such industries include education, medicine, nursing, not to mention the most obvious one, my own domain of consulting!
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