Whew! This blog vanished for almost two weeks, as you may have noticed. I know some of you did because three of you emailed about it. The page was completely blank. The white space was not exactly soothing. Was 15 years of effort here (the blog began in 2009) down the drain?

IT got on it and, thankfully, the problem was simply a plug-in that had expired. That was updated, which restored everything. Double whew.

However, the blog has gone down a couple of times in the past, and there’s always the chance the blog will go down permanently. If so, I hope arrangements can be made in advance to shift activity elsewhere with notice of a new address. A lot of valuable material is here!

I can’t say I’m adding much to the valuable material at this point. Blogs kind of had their moment, and then people moved on to Facebook groups, where they can bash out a quick, misspelled comment. (Ha!) And now that I’m driving hither and yon for my columns there isn’t time to contribute here much, other than posting column links and a monthly Reading Log.

It can be hard for me to remember the period when I had time to spend a couple of hours writing Restaurant of the Week reviews and other posts. It’s just a pleasant memory now. Times change.

But this blog is still a good place for me and possibly for you. If nothing else, it’s somewhere where you can easily find my columns without being on social media. If you still check in here, thank you!

With my blog access back, there’s the question of how, or whether, to post links for all my columns going back to July 3 that were missing. Is anyone really looking for them at this point? Well, maybe Sunday’s. I don’t have the heart to write nine individual posts. Yet for the record, I’d like the links on the blog.

So, let me gang all the absent column links together here in one post. Here you go.

July 3: 75 years of love and jokes for Corona couple

July 6: Baseball, BBQ combine for a Royal time in Kansas City

July 8: ‘Peanuts’ strips about Riverside were no flight of fancy

July 10: A scene from Upland is seen in Illinois

July 13: Promises, deflection by Riverside County on Turpin report

July 15: After wild trip from China with dog in tow, couple settles in Upland

July 17: ‘Catacombs’ at Mission Inn are stuff of Riverside legend

July 20: Tunnel to ONT may move forward without Elon Musk

July 22: San Bernardino to potential Carousel Mall developer: hold your horses

July 24: These senior women embark on new chapter as folk trio

A busy month, eh? I mean, it’s my usual three per week, but it takes on a different cast when 10 columns are placed side by side.

Are any of you still accessing my columns via this blog? I assume it’s useful for some of you. You can also get to them via my columnist page on our sites, such as the IVDB: https://www.dailybulletin.com/tag/david-allen-column/

Thank you for reading.

I came back from vacation July 3, tried to get into this blog to write a Reading Log and post a column link, and got…an error message. The inner workings of the blog could not be accessed. Frustrating, because, by virtue of the blog being down, there was no way to explain here that the blog was down rather than forgotten.

Someone in far-flung Denver was supposedly going to look into it. Nada. Got the same error message for three weeks, including Friday morning. A few hours later, suddenly I could get in.

Huzzah!

Access restored, I will catch up on column posts, write a Reading Log and hope that the problem is behind us, at least for a while.

We’ll see how long this thing holds together — suddenly I’m reminded of the opening sequence to “The Six Million Dollar Man”: “She’s breaking up, she’s breaking up!” KA-BLOOIE — but our IT folks managed to disable the platform update that rendered me unable to post any text, only headlines.

I’ve caught up by posting column links to everything I’d missed going back to Dec. 1 and will get a Reading Log up this weekend, if not before.

The blog went down on Thursday, not letting me comment or post and not letting anyone else comment either. But as of Saturday morning, magic having been worked behind the scenes, the handle jiggled, the blog unplugged and plugged in again, or what have you, everything’s back online and functioning (fingers crossed). Friday’s column will go up shortly, with Sunday’s column to follow on Sunday. Whew.

As you may have noticed, the “Recent Comments” section on the right-hand side of this page was frozen in time since mid-November, stubbornly refusing to reflect any of your fresh, piping-hot comments.

Your comments showed up here, but for those of you who tried to keep up on what others posted, you were out of luck. So was I, to a point; I needed a work-around to see new comments, because I always read them and want to respond if called for.

Some of the brightest minds at our newspaper chain’s home base in Denver spent a month trying to figure out what was wrong without breaking everything. Apparently they had to revert to a previous version of the commenting software plug-in to unjam things.

That was resolved by last Thursday. Your comments are now not only flowing freely but transparently. Thanks for your patience. Now go out there and comment for the team!

Our newspaper’s website has a new look, unveiled this morning. Check it out at dailybulletin.com, Here’s a guide to the changes.

My blog is taking today off, but I’ll see you back here tomorrow.

Look at the Daily Bulletin’s website (if your eyeballs can stand it) for one last view of the old, outdated and cluttered format. They tell us that on Thursday, the site’s redesign will debut.

The preview I’ve seen looks like a vast improvement, and the home page has about 90 percent fewer headlines/links. It should be easier to find, or stumble upon, my columns. All the papers in our chain are supposed to be getting the redesign simultaneously.

Feel free to comment here on the old and new designs and their functionality.

* Head fake! At 5:30 p.m. Wednesday they announced the launch has been postponed to next Tuesday. Plenty more time to gaze lovingly, or in horror, at our website.