Underwire Technical Support

Many of you have sent me email telling me that you can’t see any of the images on this website, and while I don’t have time to troubleshoot each individual instance of this happening, I did call my hosting provider, and they say it isn’t their fault.

Of course it isn’t their fault.

Some of you can see the images, some of you can’t, and this didn’t start happening until Leta was born, so I guess I have to blame Leta.

I can definitely blame Leta for the butt sores and the vaginal stitches and the huge bags underneath my eyes, and now I’m going to blame her for my bandwidth problems. This is one privilege of having kids.

When I posted about Leta’s birth a few weeks ago this website was linked to by a few high profile community sites and my traffic doubled in one day. My traffic has remained twice what it usually was and I think I can safely say that it’s causing problems on the server that hosts my site. I actually got someone in technical support to admit that it may be the “throttle” that is sending up broken images, meaning that when a lot of people hit my site at once the server tries to preserve bandwidth for other websites hosted on the same server, and it prevents any more transfer from happening between dooce.com and people who are trying to view it. Thus, broken or missing images.

I know it’s not my code causing problems because I’ve checked and rechecked the code. Plus, Jon oversaw the initial creation of my code and if he says it’s okay, then people, it’s okay. He can wire ELECTRICITY, for god’s sake.

I can’t really afford to switch hosting providers right now because I have to pay for diapers and butt wipes, and for those of you who aren’t living in the diaper and butt wipe world, let’s just say that with the money spent on keeping my daughter’s butt fresh and clean I could double my CD collection in about two months. Not that I will ever hold that against her. I may, however, invoice her for 10,500 CDs the first time she asks me to co-sign a loan.

My suggestion to those of you who can’t see the images is to 1) reload the page, or 2) click where the logo usually appears, or 3) try viewing the site at a different time of day, or 4) just imagine the pictures of the cutest baby in the world (it’s not hard, just think about a frog with really chubby cheeks). I don’t know what else to tell you. I wish my hosting provider would help me more, but yesterday when I called them I was breastfeeding Leta, and I’m pretty sure the tech support guy could hear the VERY LOUD breastfeeding noises — the slurping, the gulping, the talking to the breast. And I think he was very afraid.

In summary: I’m sorry if you can’t see my images. I don’t know what to do. My baby is cute and she slurps.