computer says no

This will be a brief and late blog post as I was wrestling with another internet posting challenge after coming in from the garden, trying to update the music society's website.  The template was put together for us practically pro-bono by a helpful chap who does them for various small arts organisations plus his local pub.  I haven't entirely worked out why he should go to such trouble on our behalf, and can only think it is his way of charity volunteering.  I do talks for the woodland charity because I would like to support it and after my previous career I know how to talk.  He must wish to support the arts and know how to do websites.  We are limited to variations on his basic template, and you can see the family resemblance between his various clients, but it looks very nice and for our purposes is ideal.  The way he does links is actually more elegant than the links facility in Blogspot.

Unfortunately a couple of weeks ago the site went into mini meltdown, which was not his fault but something to do with the server.  It began to scramble dates, which is pretty terminal when you are trying to advertise concerts.  I could understand the process whereby Sunday 5 March was transmuted to 3 May, but why 9 October turned into 29 September had me stumped.  Our adviser became very cross with the host provider, and the whole site had to come down for a time and when it reappeared had initially lost all the input data, which upset the Chairman a good deal and me quite a bit as it took me the whole morning to input the 2016-17 season last time.

Unfortunately the introduction to our bargain website designer came via the Chairman's other arts connections, and when I tactfully enquired whether I might communicate directly with him so as not to have to route everything through her or whether she would prefer to manage the relationship herself, the designer did not sound keen on my contacting him.  He is doing us a massive favour producing our site for practically nothing, so if he wants to speak to the organ grinder rather than the monkey I can't complain.

The server problem was supposed to have been fixed, and I sat down this evening to input an extra concert we are staging for local amateur musicians, conscious that I had promised to do it yesterday, and go through all the pages to check that everything was all tickety-boo.  Alas, it is not.  The site has eaten the ticket order form which was stored as a PDF, along with the other stored documents, and it will not let me input it again.  Or at least, in edit mode it says the document has been uploaded, but when I click on the booking form in the list of documents it says Server Error.  As I am not supposed to approach the designer directly I have had to lob the whole issue back to the chairman, who has quite enough other things to do.