the Internet – the Place where we learn and teach

Yesterday morning, after I had dumped all the remaining ice out of a cooler, and then ran the garbage disposal in our kitchen sink the night before, the air gap faucet on our reverse osmosis water tank was leaking. Water came out of the small hole on the bottom of the faucet, partially dripping along a hose into the cabinet under the sink. Not good!

We shut the cold water in our kitchen off, went to work, and planned to fix this later. But how? The initial assessment in the morning was clear: something is clogged somewhere. Great! Two questions remain: 1. where exactly is it clogged? and 2. how do we unclog it?

I spent my lunch hour researching the problem online. The biggest problem is knowing what to ask Google so that you get relevant results. I find that wording your problem like a question you would ask a person works pretty good nowadays. When I asked Google “how do I fix a leaking faucet on my reverse osmosis system?” I found lots of great explanations about how reverse osmosis systems work, what could go wrong, and how to fix things. My leaky faucet, though, resisted discovery for quite some time – simply because I didn’t know what question to ask.

I first had to learn that there are two different types of faucets commonly used in RO systems. Ours has what’s called an “air gap faucet” – hence the little hole in the bottom. After I learned this new detail, I refined my search to “air gap faucet on reverse osmosis tank leaks”. All of a sudden my results on Google were extremely relevant! Lots of people seemed to have had this exact same problem in their kitchen. Plenty of solutions were offered – basically all telling me to “clean out the clogged drain hose that comes out of the faucet”. OK – but how?

This is the point where some internet users evolve from learners to teachers – with varied success. I found some pretty elaborate diagrams and wordy text, telling me to take the whole faucet out and apart, and clean everything with pipe cleaners. What a project! Only one very short entry on a forum suggested to “simply blow it out”. This was the key to my success, but it required some thinking. How am I supposed to “blow it out”? Stick my head in the sink, and attempt to blow into the hole on the bottom of the faucet? That can’t be it!

fix air gap faucet leakAnd there it was again – one of my “genius moments” – I used a compressed air spray can to blow air into the little hole to clear out the drain hose. Because I try to be a good netizen, I also made an instructional video for others who may have the same problem. You will just have to know how to find it. or you can click here: how to fix a leaking air gap faucet

when less is better

My little old homepage that I built back in 1998, using Notepad for my html-editor, is still out there. Largely unchanged, for sentimental reasons. I added two sub-domains, though, for practice on newer web design techniques like HTML5 and WordPress.

Most webmasters have one main goal: get traffic. Organic traffic is considered the “best”, but many web pages also rely on marketing, SEO tactics, social media and search engine ads – all just to attract traffic. Any kind of traffic, or hopefully even targeted traffic?

In the beginning I was thrilled when I saw that somebody, anybody, had actually “visited” my little corner of the web. I “optimized” my page, I put links to it out on every place I had access to, I submitted my URL to search engines. I wanted to be “seen”. It worked, sort of. My website statistics showed growing numbers of visitors. Over the last twenty years I went from an average of 3 views per week to a staggering 83 per day.

That’s good, right?

Well, lately, I’ve been thinking – maybe not? I looked at my statistics in more detail. Where do my visitors come from? I found out, that there are very few “real” visitors. Most of my website hits come from Russia, China, Ukraine, and other places where I really can’t see my little old personal webpage being of any valid use to anybody.

This has got to stop!

So I educated myself on the options. Then I took action. I renamed pages and folders on my webpage to break any links that somebody might have stored somewhere. Then I edited my .htaccess to deny access from certain specific countries. I also deleted the sitemap, and edited the robots.txt file to exclude certain bots from crawling my site.

Then I waited…… it worked! Traffic is back down to about 5 daily hits. Real visitors who actually spend time on my page.

Life is good 🙂

Not every Change is an Improvement

So, WordPress version 5 comes with this “awesome” new super-stylish Gutenberg editor. I’m not sure if old Mr. Gutenberg would agree – but I personally don’t like that kind of “improvement”.

My goal is to provide meaningful content to my readers. I don’t want to have to struggle to learn how to go about the technicalities of making that content show up on a web page.

Every additional layer of abstraction adds to the complexity, which also goes against my basic main principle of “life should be easy, clean, and fun”.

Just in case you are resisting half-baked change, just for change’s sake, wherever you can – like me – there is a way to get the classic (very easy, clean, and fun) WordPress editor back: all you need is one additional plugin “classic editor” – search for it while logged in to your WordPress admin.

Life is good!

Short Code SMS not getting through?

I am a little paranoid when it comes to credit cards and bank accounts, so I have all my accounts set up to report any activity immediately – by email, and text to my phone.

This reassuring short “ding” sound coming out of my phone every time I swept a card somewhere went silent about a week ago, though. Email notifications were still coming through – but they take a bit too long for my taste.

So I went and checked all my settings with all my credit cards and bank accounts, I also checked all the messaging settings on my phone, and Google fi account – no luck.

Until today. Doing research online about my problem I finally discovered an old thread from 2013, where different people went back and forth about their different cell phone providers, all having the same problem: short code SMS not coming in. Deep down on page twelve of the discussion I found the hidden treasure.

Here’s what you need to do, in case your credit card usage notifications don’t make it to your phone anymore:
Text Allow All to number 9999.

You may get a response like “this service is not available” – just ignore that, your short code messages will come in again.

Belt and Suspenders for my Webspace

I had to re-learn an old lesson the hard way: never put all your eggs in one basket.

Last Tuesday my webmonitoring service alerted me of the fact that this blog was timing out on visitors. When I tried to log in to the administrator interface on my hosting provider, I found out that that didn’t work either. I received all kinds of nasty responses like “bad gateway” and such. “Support” from my provider only exists in the form of online chat, with some outsourced gimmick in India.

After a lengthy session they at least admitted, that it was an issue on their servers, and there was nothing I could do about it. “So sorry for the inconvenience, we’ll let you know when it is fixed”.
Five days later – still no resolution – I decided on a way forward for myself – whether JustHost gets their act together, or not.

    1. My old blog is still available, and it is working fine – I’ll duplicate all posts on there from now on. Karin’s Adventures (on Blogspirit)
    2. I will set up a “shadow” presence with a different domain name karin-web.net and host it with a (hopefully more reliable, customer friendly) provider. All my pages, including this blog, will be duplicated onto the new domain.