Happy August! (Yes I am a little posting to the site.. those of you on the mailing list received your copy of the full newsletter on time.. give or take a couple of days..) with only 56 subscribers, and 5.6% opening rate. Its a little discouraging, but this too shall pass.
I hope you all had a fantastic 4th of July holiday! Here in DTLA, it was hard to tell the difference between gunshots and fireworks. But hey, the view from the rooftop was absolutely amazing.
Speaking of fireworks, here’s a little bit of useless information I picked up this past year: apparently, gang members use fireworks to cover the sound of real gunfire. Who knew?
It’s been one of those months here at the Haus. The kind of month where everything seems to be working great, until suddenly, chaos erupts and nothing is okay. It all started with a random text message: “Urgent Action Required” from my website hosting service, Hostinger. Since I knew the bill was paid, it had to be a technical issue. And sure enough, it was a major technical problem that took some time to figure out.
Apparently, I had reached the limit of my hosting plan’s resources and needed to upgrade immediately to a bigger plan. I was completely shocked—no way in hell could I have reached the limits!
Now, keep in mind, the tech support folks believed the problem was that I had hit my limits and needed to buy more resources. It’s not their job to figure out what the actual problem is.
The best they could do was send me a link to some documentation with suggestions on how to reclaim resources. Basically, I was on my own.
The list included some things I hadn’t given much thought to—how was I supposed to know? So, as suggested, I started clearing caches, optimizing images, doing little things, but it still didn’t fix the issue. It was one of those moments where you just want to throw in the towel. Then suddenly, it hit me—could it possibly be all the mockup images?
It wasn’t just the sheer number of mockup images; it was the combination of several factors. The database was bloated with unnecessary images and duplicates. Upon further investigation, I noticed that each product variation had its own set of mockup images. For example, greeting cards had four options for paper and four options for quantities, with each combination being a separate file. That’s 20 files for just one image! Now imagine having 800 items.
The media library was stuffed full of images, and they all needed to be compressed, with the caches cleared. So, the solution involved going back into each product page, deleting all the extra images, then deleting them from the database, compressing what was left, and finally clearing all the caches.
It’s been a slow process, going through and deleting 75% of the images in the media library, cleaning the database, and then deleting them from the trash. It’s a real pain in the ass, but there’s no shortcut to solving this problem.
Thank God for the database cleaner that helps tidy things up. The project continues as I tackle this in batches, all while trying to stay on top of other tasks—like finishing up this newsletter!
Be sure and check out the shop for new stationary and home décor added this month!
