Ismysiteworking? started as a personal reference — a place to write down the things I kept looking up, the fixes I kept rediscovering, and the lessons that came the hard way from years of building and maintaining websites.
The honest version: I have broken things, restored things from backup at two in the morning, watched a site get hacked because I didn't update a plugin, and spent far too long chasing a problem that turned out to be a single wrong character in an .htaccess file. This site is the result of all of that.
What you will find here
Practical guides for people who run websites but are not necessarily developers by trade — freelancers, small business owners, bloggers, and people who have somehow ended up responsible for a site whether they wanted to be or not.
The focus is on things that actually happen: sites going down, performance dropping, forms stopping working, SSL certificates expiring, spam arriving. Not theoretical best practices, but the real-world process of keeping a website running smoothly.
The tools section
Alongside the articles there are free tools for testing and diagnosing your site — checking whether it is reachable, tracing redirects, inspecting HTTP headers, and verifying SSL certificates. More are being added as time allows.
About the author
I'm Alistair Macleod. I've been building websites since the late 1990s, when tables were layout and Internet Explorer 6 was a serious consideration. I run Technic-al, a small web development practice, and this site is a side project that grew out of notes I was keeping anyway.
If something on this site has helped you, or if you have spotted an error or have a suggestion, I would be glad to hear from you via the contact page.
Accuracy and updates
Web technology moves quickly. I try to keep articles current but some details — version numbers, plugin names, interface locations — may have changed since an article was written. The date at the top of each article shows when it was last reviewed. If something looks out of date, please let me know.