It’s been quite an event! I’m sure many of you know, I’ve moved my blog. Some of you probably don’t know and may be wondering why my blog has been wonky for the last week or so.
I have been wanting to move away from my self-hosted blog for a long time, but dreaded the process – and I wasn’t wrong. Besides the fact that I’d get lots of messages throughout the last few years that readers were having a difficult time commenting on my blog, I’ve had so many issues myself with my old host. I paid substantial money for almost 8 of the 9 years I’ve been blogging, and when technical bad things were happening with it, the support I had was less than mediocre and I had to rely on the kindness of of some writing friends to get me out of a blog jam.
I decided at the longtime urging of my good friend and Fey sister, Colleen Chesebro, now was the time. With the advent of the new BIG WordPress update coming (something that always gave me blog woes), and the thought of me having to deal with scary blog stuff while I escape for a some winter sanity, Colleen convinced me to get it over with now. And it was far from easy.
I decided it would be easier down the road to move back to paid WordPress and let them deal with the headaches. And moving my blog from Godaddy was a nightmare! Colleen helped me a lot. First step was creating a blank WordPress.com new platform to move my content over to, except there were many hurdles. The trick I’ve learned, is to get a good WP happiness engineer – and that only took 2 or 3 until the right one showed up.
The plan was simple, export my content from old site and import into new blog – not so easy. My content wouldn’t load. Colleen was dealing with a WP tech with questions about the import problem and she said she’d get back to her. Well 5 days passed, no blog activity, stuck between two worlds on two platforms and after several days I knew nobody was answering back. And by that time, my old blog content was gone! That’s when the real chaos began.
After 2 days of calling Godaddy (now dubbed NOdaddy from me), first waiting 2 hours til a human picked up and more hours trying to explain I need my blog content and several useless support there, my blood pressure was rising. In the meantime, I was being coached by a WP tech as to how to bring over files MANUALLY. Yes, non backdoor techy me, trying to absorb technical jargon. By the second day of repeat performance, I finally got a WP angel who had spent almost 2 days coaching me of alternative methods to get this and that – to no avail. I finally got through to the WP tech that I was useless in this venture, especially with the SERIOUS LACK OF HELP FROM NODADDY. Let’s just say he went far beyond the call of duty and did things to make the magic happen that were not his job. He and I had a running chat going by email for 4 days! He got the ball rolling last Friday, and yesterday he finally finished getting almost 9 gigs of content over to my new blog, and Colleen went in to make it pretty. I didn’t lose anything, (except what was left of my sanity), my years of posts are back WITH the matching images.
I’m still learning Gutenberg editor tips, but surprisingly, I didn’t find it that complicated. And thanks to my friend Hugh Roberts, who posts excellent tutorials on the new editor, I had already got the basic hang of it.
So, I want to welcome you all over here to my new blog, where it should be easy sailing for readers now to interact. I also hope you will all hit the ‘follow’ button when you visit here. I have to say, it’s a bit discouraging seeing my followers go from over a thousand to 11 LOL – not a good look on a writer whose been blogging for 9 years. And I thank you all for putting up with the madness and coming back!
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DGKayewriter.com 