I’m not sure they will get much more done today … they have been sleeping every since.
If you want to read about my efforts this morning or the 1st half of the day, to move Heidi’s blog and hopefully the other blogs to her(their) new dot com site, hosted by DreamHost then read from here on. There is some humor, a little frustration, few questions, a lot of head scratching and 2nd guessing.
First of all when I talked to a friend about this a few weeks ago, even before moving to WordPress, she told me “if you are not going to make money off of a site then why pay for a domain and a host for that site.” Estimated depending where you buy the domain and hosting service .. but a $100 – $125 per year.
So I decided to move my blogger blog to the free WordPress side. I liked the dashboard, all of the themes. I even found 4 different themes that I really liked for each blog. They all seemed to fit, if you know what I mean. In this story I am about to tell it will be important that you remember what I just said about ‘themes’. :)
I had some good sleep Thursday night. No health issues like the night before. Stella wakes me Friday morning, I feel rested, a couple of cups of coffee and I am ready to move some blogs from here to their new domains, onto a host and publish online. Should be easy.
Over the years since I last did this type of work at home, everything seemed to be a one-click operation. I had Heidi’s blog moved within minutes. Her domain showed up online within 30 minutes which I thought was extremely fast. DreamHost had a WordPress app where with one-click it installed Heidi’s blog without an issue.
Luckily last week when I was uploading photos from my computer to WordPress’s “Media Library” I had made a folder for each hound. I did not find out until today why I did that.
I followed the steps furnished to me by DreamHost. Heidi now had a new WordPress.org site, hosted by DreamHost and showing up online with her .com domain. Once I uploaded the photos again from my computer, Heidi’s folder to her new WordPress “media library”, all the photos matched up with the imported blog posts and were correctly installed.
All of her posts were there, the categories, the tags, about page, contact page … EVERYTHING … but … the theme.
Remember what I said a few paragraphs ago about ‘themes’?
Sure they only showed 20 different themes to use in the default setting but after I clicked that “add more”, I had 2,168 themes to chose from and as I scrolled through not even a 1/3 of them I notice my data counter is spinning like you would see dollar/cents on a gas pump. When you only have 15Gb per month on your internet service plan and only had 700 Mb left for the month with 5 days to go …. data spinning out of control is NOT want you want to see happening!!!
The bottom line was, out of 2,168 themes available, NONE of the themes I am using on the free side of WordPress were available on the .org side of WordPress. They didn’t show up when I searched them, they didn’t get answers back when I asked on the support forums.
By the time I had noticed and shut off my browser due to data usage going out of control, I received an email from my internet service provider that I had used my monthly allotment of 15Gb’s. Of course there are options and that is an expensive option in my book … I can buy more Gig’s at $10 per 1Gb until my new billing cycle starts on the 27th.
Now that I have ran over my limit, I still have internet access but at “dial-up” speeds … if the page loads at all.
Or I can stay up from Midnight until 5am and use all the data I want, like I always can between those times of night. High speed will be the norm during those 5 hours, it’s called their “free data” on my plan.
Let’s get back to the blog issue and a domain name.
So I have a blog with it’s own domain name and that makes it look so official, yet there is not one theme that I want to use. I like the theme that Heidi has on her blog now, on the free side of WordPress.
I’m not sure I want to move forward on moving everything to a .com domain. Really what is the reason? Those words of my friend a few weeks ago, echo in my brain. I basically have 4 blogs set up the way I want them. All I have to do from now on is post, answer comments and “let it ride”.
Oh, I thought about all of this before and even from what I read I might have to rebuild some of the blogs that I would transfer to WordPress’s .org side of the house. Other writers kept saying it was just soooooo important that I own my own blogs, not letting a ‘free’ host keep control of them.
I just received an email from my forum question about my theme or the three themes. It’s sad that the solution is so simple. It is something I saw when I chose that theme early this week. The maker of the theme, WordPress.com has a “download” button on theirs to where all I need to do is download the them to my computer, upload to Heidi’s .com site. How easy is that … and how brain dead I am at times. LOL
So with that answer you can tell where this is going … back to Heidi’s site to get her theme uploaded. If that goes smooth then I will be able to move Stella’s, Sadie’s and even mine by the end of today.
Of course that changes all the domains again. I will will post them here and on the hound blogs once I know for sure that each site works.
Back to my Exede Internet provider. Due to my location I don’t have any other choice but satellite internet. Believe me I looked and called every possible provider in June 2014. This is it. My speeds will eventually trickle to where I can’t even load an email or a website, even though they tell me that’s not possible because I will always have access, just not high speed access.
It will become so slow I will have no choice but to buy more data or have to stay off the internet until January 27th. That might actually be a good thing … lol … a little vacation.
Now I’m headed back to some computer work and it should go fairly fast now that I know how to get those themes loaded. Will I have the internet speed to do it??