@webwatchdog @michelle @digitalrefresh
I’ve been doing some research on this. The placeholder[dot]com site seems to have been down a while, although it does seem to be OK every once in a while. Cloudflare notifications and database connection errors on the site for the last couple of hours I’ve been looking at it. No activity from them on Facebook or Twitter since Nov. 2020. I just tagged them in a tweet, but I expect no results. Also, nothing *at all* about them in the news.
I thought that I might add code to ping the site to see if it is up, but it always pings just fine, so that’s not an option.
Since this is a 3rd party service, the issue is unfortunate but not unheard of. We all know the horror stories when an open source or free service just stops working. Or gets hit with malware!
Given that, I do see some alternative placeholder image generators out there. I am looking at the code now where the placeholder site is being used, so replacing with a good, solid substitution site will take minimal effort.
I am also going to look into the possibility of using PHP code to generate the placeholders so something like this won’t happen again. I’ll keep everyone posted. Thanks so much for your patience and understanding! 🥰
Fullscreen Vimeo background?
