Everyone's Doing It: One Girl's Trials & Errors with Wordpress

*Post written at the end of August-- I know. I'm such a bad blogger.*

As some of you know, I recently tried out a self-hosted wordpress blog. I set up all those domain bounces and moved all my stuff-- and turns out that I really didn't like wordpress. But why not? Everyone else did... was I just some weird fluke or something? Don't get me wrong, it was okay; but only for the first few days. I missed my home here, at blogger. But part of my missing blogger was some problems that I was having with wordpress. It was impossible to get my comments imported correctly. I tried everything. Keep in mind that while I was trying to figure out the duplicate comments problem, I was also paying for hosting each month and trying to figure out what was wrong with me. (Why didn't I like it? Am I just not cut out for this stuff?)

My first problem (other than the comments) was the fact that the theme I wanted (free, yes I'm cheap) just WOULD NOT display correctly, even though I hadn't done anything to it! So, after asking around a little bit, I talked to Ashley from Nosegraze, who was so helpful and fixed my theme issues within a few minutes. I can't thank her enough for that one! (:

But anyway, back to the comments, my actual, true-blue, second problem-- I imported my comments from blogger immediately, of course. And what happened? Well, about half of them imported twice. I have yet to figure out if that was my own stupidity or a glitch in the import. So, I set ahead deleting all the duplicates-- and then, when I'm finished, I happen to go do something and come back...every single duplicate was back. I CANNOT stress to you guys how terrible that was-- I eventually just gave up, it was never going to work for me, you know? But from that point on, I got to work importing in my intense debate comments, which required the making of a site map, which took forever, and then it didn't work. They never showed up.

It imported them to the wrong place, which meant I could look at my dashboard (on disqus and wordpress) and they were there, but if I searched for them on the site they were just gone. It was an unfixable, troublesome problem. From that point on, I decided that since I couldn't figure out most of the plugins, and I missed my blogger stuff (I know, *gasp*) I was moving back. ASA-freaking-P. So I set out to do that. I started madly googling "keep your domain after move from wordpress to blogger" and other similar things and found out something sad-- my current provider, RFE Hosting, just wasn't set up for a move back to blogger. So, of course, I switched providers; which cost me another ten dollars. I decided to go with the most popular host I could find-- Go Daddy.

I put in the transfer request-- I was excited to start moving back. My payment went through, then the transfer began...or it should have. Turns out that it takes 60 days for a new domain to be old enough to move to a new host. I was SO upset. I know that this has nothing to do with any companies, but I was so upset at this point that it didn't even matter.

I got a call a few days later from a company representative, which helped a little bit with my sadness. I got another one a few weeks later asking how my domain was going. I told the man, of course, that I hadn't started the move yet. He said, "well, your domain is already here, according to my page". I told him I would check, and immediately logged on...to see that everything was just as I had left it. :/ A week later, I got an email saying my domain was finally eligible for transfer! I was ecstatic! I don't know if you guys know this, but I've been posting on my blogger for the last month, even though it wasn't going anywhere. I missed it.

So a day later, I took the redirect code out of my blogger html. Remember how excited I was earlier? Well, that died shortly afterward. I began the transfer (after working for hours on several different computers to start the transfer)...only to find out that I needed a code from my previous host, RFE Hosting, that was impossible for me to find. I spent three days looking for it, knowing that if I didn't have it within seven days, the transfer would be canceled.

I finally contacted customer support. The guy that I talked to was very nice, and told me that I would need to request the code through him-- the asked me why I wanted it. I got the code in my email the next morning. Here's the part where I was excited again-- finally I was going somewhere. But once I input that code, I got another email. "It will take up to seven days for your previous host to approve this request." Ouch. More waiting. I try to be patient, I really do, but it's just not me.

Yesterday I got an email-- your domain transfer has been approved! By this point, I was dragging butt. (Is this really worth it? I'll do it tomorrow, I'm too dang tired.) So, this morning (August 26th) I logged onto Go Daddy, blogger, and a help site. Let's just say I spent the next two hours in a constant state of horror. Again, as is tradition, I just couldn't figure it out. I picked up the phone to call support-- and got a low battery light. That killed that idea of course. What if it went out while I was talking to some poor support person?

So I ended up going to the support forum. My issue was resolved within five minutes. It was something simple that I thought had already been taken care of. But, in case you're wondering, at this point I was just about ready to die. It worked-- kind of. I set up the blogger redirect, exactly as blogger told me to. And it's sending people to the old, now null, FREAKING WORDPRESS SITE. So, of course, I set about canceling my hosting. Which there is no option for on RFE Hosting. I contacted customer support again. Asked how to cancel my hosting-- another thing you have to do through them. He canceled it and got me a partial refund-- the partial refund was unnecessary, but it was definitely nice.

Then after the hosting and the domains and things were all set up, I thought that we were going to be perfectly ready to go; that I was going to be golden. BUT. At 8:56 PM, my blog went offline for no visible reason. Then it came back up about an hour later, but only redirected to the new domain with one address-- the blogspot one. It didn't redirect "thebookbabesreads.com" or any other variation of that. To make matters worse, my RSS feed was also gone, and the previous "non-redirect" was sending people to a parked domain. If you saw that, I am terrible sorry. But I'm still here, I swear!

The next morning, I got up and tried to start sorting out my troubles again. I was successful at fixing my RSS feed, but the aforementioned domain issues were still going on. It was horrendous. After about half an hour of screwing around by myself with numerous help articles, I decided to just call support. I was on hold for about five minutes, then I talked to a lovely woman named Teresa who had it fixed in about 30 seconds. Just one tiny problem on their end, which she explained to me when I asked. Also, she called my blog cute!

I then moved on to the comment system and stayed with it for a couple of days. It never really did work out-- if you commented on my blog (at any time in the last year with intense debate, or while I was on wordpress), I'm truly sorry but your comment is gone. :/ I was unable to fix that little snag of moving back.

In conclusion: the reason I wrote this post was just for me to vent a little-- not to discourage anyone from moving to wordpress, but to just give them a solid idea of what might happen if you move and don't like it and have to move back. Not saying that anyone will go through what I've gone through...but well, you might. If you do decide to move to wordpress, I recommend researching the host you plan on using, testing out everything before really moving your entire blog/livelihood there, and for sure using a comment system that works well. I have no suggestions other than that.