EkaBlog - Site Blog for Ekaweeka the Small Business Community

Its Sunday November 26 after Thanksgiving. Briana and I just drove close to 700 miles from Ashland, OR where we spent the holiday. Its been a long week and weekend. It is going to be an even longer winter and year to come. Tomorrow I am launching Ekaweeka.

I've been on a coherent path towards building Ekaweeka since May 2006. I say coherent because this has been a much longer story then the events of the past seven months.

In the coming weeks we will push for major developments, seek out guidance from anyone offering it, and strive to make Ekaweeka a really cool new resource for those who embrace it.

My name is Thomas Hillard and I hope you are willing to tell me what you think about Ekaweeka both its strengths and weaknesses. Regardless of how you feel about it, please come back and check the site and this blog as we continually add new features and improve existing ones.

Thank you so much.

November 28th is hardly the day I expected to launch Ekaweeka. But the timing in this twist of fate might just turn out to be brilliant though.

We have lots to do! Our todo list is 2 pages of bugs, design glitches, and (oh the horror) customizing for Internet Explorer. But I personally feel like there is enough stickiness to look past our messy workshop and begin enjoying the fruits of this site.

Setting up the domain reseller has by far become one of the worst nightmares among others in our objectives. We are on a dynamic server grid which is normally awesome, but its actually very problematic. Our IP address is constantly changing as a result of the dynamic server environment, so the domain reseller API can never verify the same IP address twice.

Meanwhile Jeff is plugging away at our widgets, soon to bring customization and content formattting to a whole new level. And my night has only just begun. Thanks for checking in, I'll be back soon.

I like to think the universe frequently throws us a curve ball, especially when its the last thing we need. A cruel type of humor... possibly. Anyhow at this time I'm referring to Ekaweeka's server at about 7:50am this Tuesday morning (11/29). Here I am having some coffee getting ready to tackle the myriad of upgrades and bugs on the site, and I open up our lovely home page only to find a less then friendly "server not found" message.

"Hmmmmmmm" I thought, dumbfounded and for some reason not surprised.

This kind of message has a lot of ramifications especially when its coming from the website you just launched. Thoughts like: What if the engines on an airplane just weren't found right after taking off on the first day of business? I'm trying to have a sense of humor about this of course. But at a time when I was already doubting our hosting company, I am now more sure then ever that I should look into another server host. I thought I was working with the best, I thought we couldn't be in better hands, but not only is their dynamic grid making our domain reseller set-up a complete hell, now for a short moment I wasn't even sure our files would exist when the system came back up. It is going to be another long day. Send me an email: tom (at) ekaweeka.com I'd love to hear other peoples stories about similar murphy's law style curve balls at the worst possible time.