Death and Downtime: Why The Recent Slowdown on JobMob

Only 4 new articles have appeared on JobMob in the past 6 weeks, and none in the past 3. What's going on?

My apologies

As soon as I understood that there would be a slowdown, I should have posted a notice so you would know what to expect until everything had come back to normal. Better late than never. Feel free to leave a comment below if you feel that I left you waiting, it's deserved.

So what happened? Read on…

Catastrophic hosting problems… now fixed

For almost 4 years now, JobMob has been growing constantly and with big plans for this year (more on that soon!), my team (yes, I now have a team helping me) and I began preparing for the future with a move to a new web hosting company that would give us much room for growth.

Unfortunately, after all our research to make the right choice, things didn't go as planned. If you had trouble visiting JobMob at any time during October and part of November, you know what I'm referring to. With the site so unstable, there was no point in posting anything new for you if the main consequence would be for the site to become unavailable for you and everyone else.

(Although it's not directly related to job search, I will soon write an article about the hosting ordeal – 4 different companies are involved! – for all the current & future bloggers and website owners that follow JobMob.)

However, just as the site had stabilized and I thought I'd get back to posting again…

My Uncle Harvey died

His passing away was completely unexpected.

It's been almost 2 weeks since my uncle was rushed to the hospital with a brain hemorrhage. Although we hoped throughout the weekend that the doctors' pessimistic view was simply a way of preparing the family for the worst, the worst is what we got. I'm just glad that he didn't suffer any pain during the quick deterioration, a fact which thankfully limited my aunt and cousins' suffering as well.

Like with my own father – even though they weren't related – I could spend hours talking about Uncle Harvey and it would be fitting, because he was known for being able to ramble on discuss anything he loved (and even somethings he didn't love) for hours on end.

A recently-retired librarian at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem's Institute of Archaeology and an old-school bartender, he had many fascinating things to tell about what he knew yet would just as happily listen in fascination about what he didn't know, usually accompanied in the background by the sounds of Kol Hamusica (Israel's publicly-subsidized classical radio station), whose every piece of music he could name in seconds (and would).

We miss him dearly. May his memory be a blessing.

If you post condolences in the comments area here below, I'll pass them on to my aunt and cousins. Thank you.

Some other mentions of his passing:

• Sad news – Zvi (Harvey) Schneider has passed away
• News of the Institute of Archaeology

Regular JobMob articles will continue next Monday, November 22nd 2010.