Bringing the Tide Chart Back After a Storm

Three weeks ago the site went down for the better part of an afternoon, right in the middle of a Tuesday when I wasn't even near a computer. I found out from a message a regular sent asking if the pier had washed away. It hadn't — the hosting had a rough patch, and the site sat there loading nothing but a blank tab for a few hours. Not a disaster, but longer than I'd like anything to sit broken.

Once it was back up I spent an evening going through what actually happened, and it turned out to be a fairly boring cause — a caching layer that hadn't been checked in months quietly filled up and stopped serving pages properly. Nothing exciting, no drama, just an old setting that needed attention it hadn't had.

I added a simple check that runs every morning now and tells me if anything looks off before a player would ever notice. It's not clever, just a small script pinging the site and flagging anything slower than it should be. Small boats need small, steady maintenance more than big fixes.

What stuck with me afterwards wasn't the downtime itself but how quickly someone noticed and said something. Running a site alone means you don't always catch problems first, so a message like that matters more than it probably should. I wrote back, fixed it, and felt oddly grateful for the nudge.

Since then I've kept a closer eye on the parts of the site that don't get much attention — the bits underneath the games rather than the games themselves. It's less fun than naming a new reel game, but it's the part that keeps the harbour open when nobody's looking.