One day early last week, I heard from a number of people who were having trouble accessing the DH blogs, and I was having the same problem myself.

So I went and found our web guy, who said he could access the blogs just fine and told me the answer was for all of us non-accessers to “clear our cache” in whatever browser we were using.

“How do you do that?” I asked, and he showed me, and it wasn’t really all that hard.

But after a while I got to thinking: Wasn’t it kind of a coincidence that multiple people all suddenly needed to clear their caches on the same day?

Wasn’t it more likely the problem was with the blog site itself rather than individual computers?

The web fellow agreed and followed up with the outside company that hosts the blogs (I admit I have no real idea how all this works) and found that this company had indeed done some kind of server switcheroo over the weekend and that’s what was causing the problem.

Of course, fixing it still remained up to each individual blog reader, including me, so the web guy emailed me some instructions. Here they are (myself, I was lost at “Flush your DNS cache”):

Flush your DNS cache. In much the same way your browser caches web pages and images to speed up page loads, your system may cache DNS requests to open connections faster. This is most obvious when one computer accesses your site correctly on WebFaction, while another still loads your site on your previous host. You can also detect DNS caching when the IP address of your domain (for example, when using ping) is still your previous host’s server’s IP address.

To clear your DNS cache on Mac OS X:

Open a terminal session.
Enter dscacheutil -flushcache.
Press Enter.

To clear your DNS cache on Windows XP:

Press Windows + R. The Run dialog appears.
Enter cmd in the Open field.
Press Enter. The command prompt appears.
Enter ipconfig /flushdns.
Press Enter.

To clear your DNS cache on Windows Vista:

Click Start ‣ All Programs ‣ Accessories.
Right-click on Command Prompt. A menu appears.
Click Run as administrator. The User Account Control dialog appears.
Click Continue. The command prompt appears.
Enter ipconfig /flushdns.
Press Enter.

 

Thoroughly befuddled, I sent the web man a note saying I was, well, thoroughly befuddled, and he promptly came to my work station and flushed my cache, which is not nearly as much a violation of personal space as it probably sounds like to you.

Anyway, I am once again able to view mine and all the other blogs, and I hope you are too. At least mine, anyway.