Let me just tell you about our weekend. 

After a busy Halloween week filled with college ministry, cooking, trick-or-treaters, doctor’s appointments, and blogging, we finished a loooooooong post about 70+ things to do in Pawhuska, Oklahoma, on Thursday, posted it, and headed to Lincoln for a night out with friends and family.

We had a fantastic Italian dinner at Vincenzo’s in Lincoln before walking a few blocks to the Lied Center for Performing Arts to see singer Kristin Chenoweth.

An intimate evening with Kristin Chenoweth

To be honest, I didn’t know much about this Broadway singer and Oklahoma native before that night. But let me tell you, having heard her sing softly with tears in her eyes and then crack a joke and belt out another show tune, I’m a big fan, now.

An Emmy and Tony Award-winning actress and singer, Kristin Chenoweth dazzled the audience with songs like Moon River, Upon This Rock, and For Good, while telling stories and sharing her experiences between each one.

It was a magical night. We got home late but decided to answer a few emails and Facebook messages before going to bed. As we worked, we noticed that our website was not loading correctly and we weren’t able to access the WordPress dashboard that allows us to edit our website.

So, just before midnight, we sat in our home office in our robes, on the phone with our website host company trying to troubleshoot the issue. After several minutes of the most annoying on-hold elevator music EVER, someone came on and asked if we’d had an excessive amount of traffic on our site today.

Still up at 1 a.m. working in our home office.

Just as I was telling the customer service representative that we may have had a bit more traffic than usual, Steve noticed that our post about Pawhuska had been shared on The Pioneer Woman Mercantile Facebook page. Apparently a whole bunch of The Mercantile’s 331,510 followers tried to read our blog post. ALL. AT. THE. SAME. TIME.

The Pioneer Woman Mercantile shared our post on its Facebook page and the response was overwhelming.

And they “liked” it. And they “shared” it. And they “commented” on it. So, apparently, our website host company has something called a query limit (who knew) that was exceeded and to put it in laymen’s terms, crashed our site. 

I didn’t know whether to cheer or cry. In one moment, we were high-fiving each other that The Pioneer Woman Mercantile shared our post, and we were elated that so many people wanted to read, like, and share it. Then, in the next moment, we were on the verge of tears, realizing that few of the people who wanted to could actually see it.

Let’s just say all of this made for a very short night’s sleep. We were back on the phone with tech support early the next morning with calls, emails, and chats continuing throughout the day.

Bottom line: Our little travel blog was having growing pains and we realized we needed to make some changes to keep up.

I won’t bore you with lengthy explanations of words and acronyms like propagation, bare domain, DNS and CNAME or the conversations we had learning about them. Just know that we have a new Nebraska-based website host (thanks, Flywheel), our own virtual private server, and we can accommodate lots more site visitors now. Yay!

If you got an error message over the weekend or noticed latency in our site, we’re sorry for that. Thank you all for your patience and understanding and for sticking with us as we try to figure out the blogging world one tech call at a time.