Friends a brief personal

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Friends, a brief personal and house-keeping note. As I wrote when I arrived in New Hampshire a couple weeks ago, I wasn’t able to send email, only receive it. I eventually came up with a work-around that allowed to send a few time-sensitive emails. But sending that way was complicated and time-consuming. So lots of emails went unanswered. And, with all the rush of running from one campaign event to another, a backlog of unread emails numbering upwards of a thousand built up too.

In any case, I’m not going to be able to respond to all of these. But I will read them all and respond to as many as I can. So if you’ve asked some question and haven’t heard back from me yet, please bear with me for a few days while I’m working through the backlog, which I’m going to try to do this weekend.

Also, some of you have noticed that we’ve been having intermittent server problems going back a week or so. In most cases this has just been slow downloading. But in a few cases on one day over the weekend the site was, albeit briefly, almost totally inaccessible.

Part of this is due to some egregiously bad service by our Web hosting provider. Some has been due to the spike in traffic during the last week before the primary (if we’re lucky I think we’ll have a bit over 400,000 individual readers this month). But the big issue is that the hosting set up that worked when we were dishing out six or seven hundred page views a day two or three years ago just isn’t up to the task of managing the sixty or seventy thousand page views per day we’re serving up now.

We didn’t want to make a switch to an altogether new set up while I was reporting from New Hampshire because when you make such a switch-over there’s always a chance that the site can go down entirely or various other glitches can come up. As it happened, there was quite enough mixing of two worlds for my taste, sitting down for a quick meal at the Merrimack restaurant, trying to find my way out of my oversized parka, and yelling into my cell phone to the tech support dudes down in Georgia about why a guaranteed 72 hour turn-around for getting my site fixed (three days before the primary) really didn’t strike me as a satisfactory answer.

In any case, we’re going to be working on finding a robust set-up that will be able to grow with the site. So a new faster-loading TPM should be on the way soon.

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