Glitch interrupts celebration website

The Eugene Celebration is once again the master of its (Web) domain.

But whether you can bring up www.eugenecelebration.com on your computer, smartphone or e-tablet today could be another issue, because as of Wednesday night lots of folks still could not.

The 31st edition of the annual three-day festival of all things Eugene starts Friday and runs through Sunday. So the timing of the expiration of the celebration’s website earlier this month could hardly have been worse.

“We are in the process of changing ownership of the domain and it has been glitchy getting back up for some reason,” Brendan Relaford, operations manager for Kesey Enterprises, which manages and produces the celebration, said in an e-mail Tuesday.

Relaford said Kesey Enterprises was working with Network Solutions, a domain name registration business based in Virginia, to get the website up and running as soon as possible on Wednesday.

But when Wednesday came, putting eugenecelebration.com in your Internet browser still didn’t bring up the site for many. What some folks were getting was the logo for Network Solutions alongside a message saying “eugenecelebration.com expired on 08/03/2013 and is pending renewal or deletion.” They also got links to other websites such as DateACowboy.com and Minddabble.com.

“We aren’t sure what is happening, but it is being worked on,” Relaford said in a follow-up e-mail on Wednesday. “There is a glitch between Network Solutions and our host. The site works for a number of people — but not others for some reason.”

Some Register-Guard staff members, for example, discovered that they could get the correct eugenecelebration.com website on their smartphones after they turned their WiFi settings to “off.”

Celebration spokesman Pat Walsh explained what happened this way: “The domain name (eugenecelebration.com) expired and (Kesey Enterprises) didn’t know that, and they just got notified a couple of days ago. The person who had originally registered the domain name five years ago … they couldn’t get hold of him.”

Walsh said Kesey Enterprises paid for the Web address again this week and that everything should be back to normal by this morning.

“It takes like 48 hours for the whole thing to get rebooted,” he said.

Kesey Enterprises has had “a trickle of calls” inquiring about what’s happened to the website, Walsh said. People have been directed to the event’s Facebook page for information.