Webseriestoday.com is back!

The DNS issue appears to be resolved. If you are still experiencing a problem leave a comment or tweet @webseriestoday.

Understanding what happened.

To understand what happened it helps to understand a little about the history of Web Series Today. We began as a blog called LG15 Today and as such the underlying URL is http://lg15today.blogspot.com. At around the time LG15 reached a conclusion, one of our authors decided to register LG15today.com to simplify access to the blog. At around the same time it became clear that in order to survive post-LG15 we would need to broaden the range of web series covered. This allowed us to evolve the underlying blog into a blog that now tries to keep the entire Web series community up to date with what is going on within the community. At that time I came up with the new "Web Series Today" name and asked the author who had set up the domain name to acquire and direct webseriestoday.com to http://lg15today.blogspot.com

There are two steps to this process. First, as I understand it at a simplistic level, you point the domain DNS setting to blogger. Secondly you reset internal settings within the blog to link the domain name DNS with the original blog. Thus when you access webseriestoday.com all you see is the underlying blog which is still located at http://lg15today.blogspot.com.

A number of you have asked what happened to cause the problem. The simple answer is that we do not know. What we do know is that late on Oct 22 the domain name DNS settings were changed. We have no idea why they were changed or by who. Further, only the author who had acquired the domain name had access to change them back. This was done on Oct 25. However because the web functions as a distributed network it takes many hours for DNS settings to change around the World. For this reason we delayed changing the internal settings within the blog. If you tried to access webseriestoday.com and were directed to a "Sedo parking site" with a series of links on it this meant the DNS setting in your area had not been updated. If you received a 404 message it meant that they had been updated (the 404 resulted because we had not yet reset the internal settings within the blog itself). On Oct 26 the internal settings within the blog were changed. At that point if you tried to visit http://lg15today.blogspot.com and the DNS setting in your area were up to date then you were taken to the blog. Unfortunately for a few, their local DNS settings may not yet have been updated and this resulted in them going to the "Sedo parking site" instead.

Having originally started this blog I accept full responsibility for the mess. Unfortunately as things currently stand I cannot promise you it will not happen again. For that reason I recommend that in addition to bookmarking webseriestoday.com you also bookmark the underlying URL: http://lg15today.blogspot.com. That said we will try and make sure the blog works reliably to the extent it is within our control.

This blog was set up to be a shared space where multiple authors could work together and as such it creates an open collaborative platform. Part of the core philosophy if that if you empower individuals they will act responsibly. Having an open platform is important to the Web series community and we hope that in that respect Web Series Today will continue to be a valuable asset.

mm