*** Important new upgrades effective today ****

Hi Folks,

Just wanted to let you all know that our gradual, but steady process of updating the website has completed another milestone as of today, January 22, 2017!

Thanks to a lot of elbow grease by Travis and his coder, we now have hopefully cleaned up all of the broken links and have now moved all content that formerly resided on the two other URLs of 'afibbers.com' and 'afibbers.net' to our default-only URL homepage of afibbers.org. Also, we have completed redirecting any attempts to access the website or forum by using either 'afibbers.com' and/or 'afibbers.net', such that now any attempt to access '.com' or '.net' will send the person automatically to 'afibbers.org' where we all can access the full website and forum content from now on.

Please just use www.afibbers.org from now on as the one URL access to our little oasis in the AFIB online universe.

This is yet another major step we needed to complete before moving to our next and final stage of upgrading the look and feel of the full website to a more modern and flexible format and design that we will be diving into shortly.

It was a colossal amount of work required to accomplish this feat, with having to update and modify over 500 pages individually! I thank Travis and his website expert for their effort in completing this needed task.

Another major outcome of this latest upgrade is that now we have insured a seamless progress to the final new web design while maintaining what search engine ranking we have earned over the last 18 years as the oldest AFIB related patient education and advocacy website. Also, the nature of these changes will further improve our search engine detection and rankings as we go forward, even before the final complete redesign is finished.

Just from upgrading the forum three months ago, we have experienced a significant increase in number of new afibbers who have been able to find our resource online. This advantage will only continue to increase now with this latest upgrade ... and even more so after fully modernizing the entire website structure.

Slowly, but surely, we are getting there!

Cheers!

Shannon



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/22/2017 06:53PM by Shannon.

Thanks Shannon and Travis for all you have done, having this group of people that understand the Afib situation is an invaluable source.....knowledge gives me peace of mind and helps calm my heart.
Tom

Thanks Shannon and Travis and his website expert!

I can't begin to imagine the amount of hours spent and frustrations that go with transitions such as these but our new look is most impressive. Hat's off to you!

It's great to have the new search engine 'power' directing new readers to a reliable source of Afib information and a wonderful start to the New Year.

Jackie

ok, its grand. How come i have not been able to go to the site for what seemed like several weeks? Error message every time until this morning. Glad to have it back but curious what was the matter.

PeggyM

Much appreciated, S!
Gracias!

/L

Hi Peggy,

I'm glad you've discovered the upgrade improvements on the forum and apologies if you had difficulty accessing the forum that past few weeks. It was always constantly accessible by using our main default URL of 'www.afibbers.org' which the vast majority had noted during our first phase of the forum update.

However, when trying to add a simple redirect instruction so that anyone still attempting to log in to the forum by first going to either of the alternate URLs of 'www.afibbers.net' and/or 'www.afibbers.com' we discovered was not at all as easy as it sounds as we first had to correct any broken links and clean up over 500 pages of the websites content to prevent people from getting stranded and possibly lost on any of the other website pages other than the home page of 'www.afibbers.org'. Travis and his coder worked diligently to get that herculean task done over the last two weeks, and as is all too common in a complete overhaul of a very old website like ours, we ran into a few more snags along the way.

It's really a shame the original site was structured and designed using all three URL's of 'afibbers.org', 'afibbers.net' and 'afibbers.com' to begin with under the idea that all 3 similar named URLs using .org, .net and .com had to be used to prevent others from taking control of those URLs not used as part of the website. In fact, once a person or company owns however many such URLs, they only need to use one URL to build a website with, which is the ideal way to structure a website so that no matter which page or section of the site is accessed by a viewer, all the activity on the full website will get credited to the one URL for the all important 'search engine ranking' in order to increase visibility and presence of the website on Google and other search engines.

As a result, the first 18 years of our existence we have had a severely limited footprint on the web with most people finding us via word of mouth or from the one search engine ranking advantage we have maintained as the oldest AFIB-centric patient education and advocacy website on the internet that is owned and operated only by and for afibbers
themselves.

Alas, too Peggy, in order to not suddenly lose that one long term SEO advantage that it took us all these years to earn, which would happen in an instant if we did not handle the redirect to our default homepage of afibber.org with specific steps in a specific sequence, so that any attempts to first access afibbers.net or afibbers.com would be redirected properly to afibbers.org ... we thus were forced to perform this massive edit job now, even though we also have repeat a similar edit again once we transfer the website data to the new website design in the coming few months!

I suspect this is a bit more than you might have bargained for Peggy , but since you asked about the 10 to 12 day period recently during which only those who accessed the website first via the homepage of 'afibbers.org' were able to directly and easily access the forum, I wanted to share just a glimpse of a few of these 'gotcha's' that inevitably come up in any big project like this.

No doubt, there will be a few more surprises and hiccups before it's all completed, but we should now be largely past the few nightmares that those of us dealing with the update had to address that were directly caused by the unfortunate division of the original site into the three separate URL's of .org, .net and .com.

Indeed, in hindsight it would have been much easier to have basically blown the whole existing site up and started fresh from scratch :-). But now we should be able to maintain much of what has made this site what it has been all these years, while hopefully adding in a modern design and the flexibility to allow us to grow into the future with a richer variety of resources to offer.

This is in addition to what is, without question and by far, the single most important resource Afibbers.org has always had to offer in the wonderful qualities of compassion and spirit of friendship along with real expertise across a wide range of AFIB-related issues found here, and that have been the hallmark of all the thousands of you folks who have built and sustained this gem of an oasis in the online AFIB universe now going into our 18th year!!

Many thanks to each and everyone of you!

Cheers!
Shannon



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/29/2017 01:47AM by Shannon.

Thank you for replying, Shannon, and i thank you and Travis for the hard work you have done. This version of the site is now workable even for an old computer-illiterate like me. Do i understand from the above that there will still be some more changes to get used to, sometime in the near future? Change is the only constant thing, as whatever sage that was has said. I still have trouble with that concept. I want the world to hold still, dammit, so i can get used to it. Fat chance.

PeggyM

Shannon,
You are SO right re the "compassion and sprit of friendship". All your work makes the site a great source of information, but it is a well a source of inspiration.
Thank Ypu....
Hey, a question: A friend at the Y I go to just had fluid build up in his pericardial sac. I guess it brought on afib as well. Drs are dealing with the whys and fixes,
to what I guess was and is in part an inflammation issue. He is getting tests, treatment (he was in the hospital 7 days. I guess some of the fluid build up had some blood in it).
Any one have any experience or general info on these type condition. For now he is on a couple of meds including 150 mg of Metoprolol.

Thanks,
Tibbar

Hi Tibbar,

The pericardial fluid build up is typically an inflammatory reaction and can range from a case of pericarditis up to a pericardial effusion which can be serious if not treated effectively and promptly. any number of causes are possible including infection in the pericardial space, prior heart surgery that irritated the pericardium and a number of other triggers.

Colchicine can be very helpful if pericarditis or pericardial effusion is diagnosed.

Duretics can be needed for a while too if systemic fluid build up in the area occurs (including too possible a plural effusion within the plural sack around the lungs) if lung involvement is part of the equation. Sometimes just garden variety edema is the culprit and it certainly warrants a thorough cardio work up and follow for sure.

Best wishes Tibbar and thanks for the kind words!

Be well,
Shannon



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 12/10/2017 01:26AM by Shannon.

As a result of hair loss i am going off of diltiazem. Reducing down.

Forum admins please take note.

The prior post is spam and from a spam account and may want to be purged from the system for the sake of security. Thanks.

Many thanks Carey and Andy for the heads up about the spammer. We dont get too many these days, but I much appreciate the quick help in letting me know so I can zap them relatively quickly.

Cheers!
Shannon



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/16/2018 01:51AM by Shannon.

Let add my thanks for this great resource, Shannon. Wish I'd had it when my Afib started but then again I didn't even have internet access for about the first seven years!

Sam

You are more than welcome Sam! Glad you found us all!

Cheers!
Shannon