Had some Fun With Websites yesterday. It began as I checked email, morning coffee in hand, and found a message from my host service that I had exceeded 80% of my allowed CPU seconds. If I hit 100%, my site might have become “inaccessible.” Things like this give me heartburn because I’m one of those “I don’t understand how things work behind the curtain I just want them to work” people. But, I dug into my host service dashboard, and saw that something happened two weeks prior that sent usage sky-high. I hadn’t made a post or uploaded images. Pretty much all I may have done was update some themes and plug-ins. I followed the host’s recommendations and deactivated one plug-in I thought might be causing trouble, then updated caching settings. That didn’t do anything. I finally initiated a chat session, and tech service found one of the plug-ins was triggering a WordPress cron job. So I disabled that plug-in, and waited. The tech said to give it time, but after two hours with no change, I poked around again, saw other plug-ins turn up in the error log, and deactivated them as well. Checked CPU, and found that yea, it had immediately crashed to the usual low level.
I know I confounded results. But whichever plug-in was the issue, they’re disabled and will stay that way. Just happy the matter was ::fingers crossed:: resolved.
It was a chilly, grey day here in NE Illinois. Now it’s nighttime at 5pm, and raining off and on to boot. Pumpkins, autumn leaf wreaths, and my scarecrow will stay up until December, but some folks already have Christmas trees in their windows and decorations out on the lawns. Not ready for that yet.
In closing, yes, still working on Echoes of War, aka the book that continues to kick Kris’ ass. The ending that I thought I had sorted last month has been resorted and reworked. I will then want to go back and tuck various lead-ins into the front part of the book. Will I finish by year’s end? I hope so.
In closing, a snippet from the later part of the book. A bit of scene-setting, as spoiler-free as I can manage:
Jani cut through the crowds, dodging travelers and crew members, luggage skims, and the odd two-wheeled passenger cart pulled by robotic horses. The concourse mirrored the main walking street of Thomasine, the capital, the storefronts a patchwork of multicolored stucco, the air so heavy with flower fragrance that it tasted sweet, the sunshine holding enough heat to warm even a hybrid’s eternal chill. Just enough similarity to Thalassa to cause her to slow and savor a little, and let go of a fragment of the tension that had held her for days in its muscle-clenching grip.