Up and Running: The Phoenix Rises (I hope! Subscribers please comment that you got your emails)
A phoenix is a mythological bird whose appeal cuts across time and cultures and appears, in various forms, in Egyptian (probably the oldest), Greek and Hindu traditions, to name only a few. It is a universal symbol of rebirth and resurrection. The most popular version of the story of the phoenix is of a powerful, brilliantly colored bird, sometimes with rays of sunlight shining out from its body, who, when it feels death approaching, builds a nest, which it ignites. The bird and its nest are reduced to ashes, from which a new Phoenix is born.
There are as many images of the phoenix as there are artists to paint them, as many tales as there are storytellers.
On May 8 of this year I published my Sunday blog, “The Poisonwood Bible: Recording the Audio Book,” struggling through yet another set of inexplicable problems with images. This had been going on for quite some time, seeping into my blogs gradually so at first I just marked the problems down to once or once-in-a-while glitches. Computer life.
First I found that certain images wouldn’t download to the media library. Then I found that more images wouldn’t download. It soon became clear that it had nothing to do with the size or the source of an image, nothing at all to do with the image itself.
While the instances of failed downloaded images continued to get worse, another situation emerged. In the blog I posted on Mother’s Day, one of the photos of my mother suddenly appeared enormous, covering nearly half the blog, in the preview and in the published post. It looked perfectly normal on the dashboard draft, but the finished product was a huge image.
By this time, I had consulted two professional website builders who donated huge chunks of time trying to figure it out. They gave up. One of them, with whom I had worked in blissful happiness for almost a year, had taken a full-time job so, in addition to being generally stumped by the whole thing, he had much less time to devote to it. He referred me to a friend whose company builds websites.
It has been a longer-than-anticipated process as they created the new site from the old. Entirely new problems with images have surfaced, still not resolved. The great scare was the loss of all my subscriptions. I think they have been retrieved. The rebuild is moving slowly to what I hope will be at least a close of the major blocks. I have a good deal of work to do that can’t be done by anyone else, and I still need instruction in using and maintaining the new site.
However, the title and the featured image for this post are the phoenix rising from the ashes. Rebirth is possible. Something is lost; something is gained.
On websites and in life. Somewhere a phoenix is always rising.
