If you tried to access The Fit Shack this past weekend, you might not have gotten through because it was down most of the time. These issues began last Friday and I first noticed that evening that my site was not up. I immediately contacted my site host (Dreamhost) to log a trouble ticket and they responded saying that I had a problem with my Wordpress plugins (said they were using too much memory….I hadn’t had any problem for the past 8+ months of running them).

This began a weekend of troubleshooting and a bit of frustration for me, trying to fix a problem that turned out wasn’t an issue on my end. Without going into all of the details, I didn’t hear from my host until Sunday and up until that point I was online as much as possible searching for info on the errors I was receiving and trying to fix something that I didn’t break. Needless to say, I became extremely frustrated and at one point I broke down crying because I was so frustrated from trying everything I could to resolve the issue. It was extremely frustrating to not get any response at all from Dreamhost until after they resolved the issue (2 days later), and all that time I thought that I was supposed to fix it on my end.

With all of that being said, what was really great about this experience was that I did not emotionally eat over it! It would have been so easy to do, especially since I was supposed to be having a fun weekend (my birthday weekend), and here I was working on these issues. Like I mentioned yesterday, I was not perfectly on my healthy eating plan over the weekend, however that was not because of my frustrating site issues. I am quite proud of myself for not giving in to emotional eating over all of these issues because in the end, any food that I would have eaten in an effort to make myself feel better wouldn’t have helped me fix my site!

Unfortunately the saga didn’t end there because last night my site went down again. I’m still getting errors in my error log, haven’t gotten a response from my host on the new trouble ticket I submitted over 18 hours ago (at the time of this writing), and I’m glad that I didn’t wait for them. After I opened another ticket, I started doing my own troubleshooting again and just like the first time, one of the things I tried was changing my theme.

Over the weekend this didn’t make any difference, however the current issue must be different because when I changed my theme last night my site loaded. At this time, the theme I’ve been using all along here at The Fit Shack still doesn’t load, which is why you’re seeing the new one. It’s not such a huge deal if I cannot use my old theme because I wanted to change it anyway, but not on the fly like I had to last night. I don’t plan to keep this one but it was the quickest one that I could modify to get my site to load again.

One thing I’d like to mention is if you haven’t subscribed to my RSS feed yet, now would be a good time to do so. If my site won’t load you can still read my posts in your feed reader. To subscribe you just need to click on the orange RSS button up in the right hand corner of this page, or you can click here. Then you select the feed reader that you want to use to read my feed. I like to use Bloglines but if you’re using Firefox, their Live Bookmarks are really easy to use; otherwise there are a whole bunch of other feed readers to choose from. You can also subscribe by email, however you will only be able to read my newest article. With RSS, you can browse through older articles even if my site won’t load.

So, that’s my current saga here at The Fit Shack. I’ve had other issues with my host and my blog site going down since I started it but nothing like this. Throughout all of it though, I’m just so pleased with myself that I didn’t turn to food. I’m really feeling like I’ve finally making some headway, and it also helps that I’ve got a goal that I’m reaching for now (I’ll share that with you in another post).

What about you? Have you passed an emotional eating test recently, a time when you could have turned to food when you were upset, but instead you journaled, worked out, or did something else besides emotionally eat? If you have I’d love to hear about it in a comment! I’d also love to hear any comments you have about the blog theme I’m using today; do you like it better than the one I was using before?