We have moved!
After some battles with out previous hosting provider, we decided to move hosting services and now we have officially moved! Maybe you have noticed a bit of radio silence in the last few weeks, that’s for a couple of reasons, not all as much fun. We will explain..
Personal struggles
With The Hedgehog Program begin a small business owned and ran by me -Judith Dunkirk- with three lovely volunteers, this means that any and all personal struggle will directly affect the business. The last few weeks have been an emotional rollercoaster and not in a good way unfortunately. I won’t disclose the issues in great detail, but i needed some time and space to heal my body especially. And unfortunately that trauma casued me to cut my field research in Pesse, very short. That along with weather conditions that were not very safe to stay in, that week has made me rethink what i want to do for The Hedgehog Program and has made me doubt to discontinue the whole company. I need to thank my lovely volunteers to keep my going and eventually to make the decision to keep going with it, despite the struggles.
The Hedgehog Program is a sole proprietorship, completely bootstrapped and ran by me. I have three volunteers who love to write articles with and for me, but other than that, i have to keep it afloat and that asks for a lot of financial investment. The Hedgehog Program at this time is not profitable and merely stays afloat because i invest personal money into the business. Because i love the work and everything it encapsules. But doing everything on my own without profit, means that i need to keep my parttime job aside from it to pay my own bills, but also to keep investing in THP until it at least gets enough income to maintain itself.
You can see why the decision to continue or discontinue THP was a hard one to make for me personally. But for now, i will continue to invest both time and money into the projects, simply because there’s still so much that needs to be done!
Moving hosting services
The decision to move hosting services wasn’t a quick decision either. For a good few months i’ve noticed very little support from my previous hosting services and that puts a strain on any website, let alone one that has such a big webspace and is essentially built as a WordPress multisite. That along with the fact that our previous hosting was definitely not cheap, the decision was easy to make. And yet… it took me quite a while. For a good reason!
Aside from The Hedgehog Program, i am also a board member of the local press agency. That agency is ran by me, my husband and a neighbour and has 10 volunteers working hard every single day to keep up with the news in our area. That website also had to be moved from the same hosting to a preferably bit cheaper but also way more steady hosting provider. So i played the waiting game. We moved the press website first, with the help of our ICT assistent. WE set everything up and i’ve monitored the hosting service for a good few months, before deciding to move The Hedgehog Program.
Now that we are moved, the Engelish website fortunately works perfectly. But, the Dutch website that works as a multisite, is not. Right now, we are trying to get it to work and fortunately our hosting provider now, has a great customer service. Until the Dutch website works, we won’t be able to do too much as it might mess with the data tables in the hosting domain databases. This quick message serves as a genuin request to please be patient as we try our best to make everything work as best as possible, so we can continue our work on THP and finally (!!!) finish the basic care course content.
New content
You might also have noticed that our wiki is gone. After evaluation of the visiting numbers, we saw that hardly anyone uses the wiki and so, it has been deleted. Instead, we now have small space for the hedgehog and tenrec species to describe their natural habitat and basic information. The care information regarding species that are held in captivity will be later on used in several free to enroll online courses, much like the current basic care course of African pygmy hedgehogs. The species pages will take some time, so please be patient with us. As per usual, we are doing the best we can with the time, money and energy we have available.
New updates hopefully very soon!
