The last couple of months have definitely been interesting in many ways. I had planned to hold a Clean Up The Ridge Route event this weekend, but those plans were delayed. I had hoped to travel a bit more, including flying out to Phoenix to be at my husband’s graduation ceremony. Well… as the whole planet is aware, things have gone awry in many ways. Some of them have been a bit more positive on my end at least. Instead of coming home after graduation, my husband came home in early April and completed his schooling online. Now, he has a Master’s in Computer Engineering. I have been working at home as well, which has been somewhat nice. I say somewhat, as it was nice to at least get out more often. I can’t beat the commute though!

The one thing this whole situation has allowed me to do has been to get some much needed work and updates done to this site. I’ve been adding photos, maps, and some pages to my US 6, US 99, and Ridge Route tours. The Grapevine Canyon page on the US 99 tour has had quite a bit added to it. I’ve also added quite a few photos to my Southern California Highways pages. My geology pages have also been getting a bit of attention. This situation has given me a bit more opportunity to go through my archives in a bit more detail and add them to the site when possible. In time, I plan to add a lot more maps to the site overall, as it is one thing it is really lacking.

I did want to say that this situation, while frustrating at times, is temporary. We may not go back to whatever we called normal for some time, but do we really want to? This is an opportunity to make some real and positive changes to how we handle so many things. If nothing else, it has taught us that we really need to upgrade our digital infrastructure. I do look forward to returning to some level of normalcy, such as a monthly trip over the Ridge Route, going to wineries, and visiting the Wisteria Candy Cottage for some of the best chocolates and fudge in San Diego County. All will need our support and more after this is over. If you have a favorite business that is presently closed, be sure to tell them via e-mail or phone how you feel. They need to hear it!

After figuring out what the problem was regarding this site not coming up in basic searches such as “Ridge Route” and “Santa Clarita Geology”, I am pleased to say that it looks like things are getting slowly back to normal.

The problems seemed to stem from “robots.txt” blocking search engines from indexing this site. I am not sure how or why that happened, as it wouldn’t be something I’d do, at least not on purpose. I corrected that and went back to Google Webmaster Tools to see what I could do. I used to have the site on there, but had been removed for some reason. After adding it back in and forcing a reindexing, I found a few more errors, which have since been corrected.

The meta keyword and description data also needed to be updated as WordPress deleted the information from my site, which it does whenever there is an update to WordPress itself. Modifying these has helped put the site out there a bit more.

I’ll stay more vigilant in my site monitoring to make sure this sort of problem doesn’t happen again. At least now I know what the issue is and can correct it. Thank you all for continued support for this site.

Well, Unbeknownst to be, this site wasn’t being indexed by Google and had effectively disappeared from searches. Now, after 24 years of work, being the first website to cover many things (the Ridge Route, US Highways 6 and 99, Geology in Santa Clarita, Wineries in San Diego County) it was rather disheartening to not even find the site after multiple pages. I think I’ve corrected this problem, only time will tell. I will not let all this work just vanish because of an error that can be corrected. I have also created a new poll for the site to help determine how people are getting to it.