We’re nearly at the end of August, just waiting for the autumn cool to kick in. Summer is usually a time for lazy days on the deck, reading and writing, beer and barbecues. Yes, there’s been all that this year, but also a lot of stuff leaving me feeling like I still need a vacation! Nothing dramatically disastrous, but a lot of small to medium stressors piling on all at once – family, health, mechanical issues, and the ever-present smoke in the air from angry Nature.
On the plus side, we’ve not been directly threatened by wildfires (though there have been a few small ones nearby, quickly handled) and we’re getting through the other hurdles in reasonable shape.
One of the stresses I’ve had to handle is setting up a new website.
I’ve used Webs since I first set up an author site in 2014. They got taken over by Vistaprint, and announced that they would be merging offerings. That announcement was way back in 2020. Since then there have been a couple of “coming soon” type messages, but little talk and even less action. Then, mid July, seven weeks ago, they announced the move was finally here. My site would drop dead at the end of August, and – no – there was no help or tools available to help with the migration. Just, “So long, and thanks for all the fish.”
Not much time to figure out what to do, especially as we were about to set off visiting family overseas for two weeks followed by more travel for medical reasons. Strike three weeks from the time available to figure my shit out!
Yep. A bit of a perfect storm.
Anyhow, long story short, I opted to give Wordpress a try and have been doing battle with their labyrinthine website editor this month. My biggest worries were to maintain a presence (which I have) and keep hold of my custom domain name (which I’ve done), so I'm still at:
The new site is still very much under construction as I manually recreate content that I scavenged from the old site. But it’s there! And I was relieved to see that when I updated my domain name details to point to the new site, existing links (such as my browser shortcuts and the links in this blog header) still worked.
That was a major headache sorted out. Now I just need to finish populating the site.
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7 comments:
It looks like it's coming together though. Sorry your host site dumped you. I've never bothered with a website, just using my blog as my website.
Glad the fires didn't come too close. Even as far south as I am, we still got plenty of the smoke though.
Alex, the blog works fine if the content you want to share fits into that format. Things like news, announcements, list of books work well. I wanted to publish a lot more static content than will fit into the blog format, hence the site. We each need to find the right tools for what we want to do :)
Hi Ian - well I'm glad you've sorted things out ... or things are ongoing as they tend to be as we and our families age. I'm glad you were able to travel away. Also I'm very glad that I haven't had your techie problems ... but you've the capability of working out what's what.
Thanks for updating us ... good luck to you and the family - with thoughts ... and I do hope Autumn rains and snow come along to put out the fires - they sound really awful. With thoughts - cheers Hilary
Ian -- good luck with WordPress. I've used it for years, and I still have trouble figuring out the interface sometimes. But it's a good flexible editor.
Rick
Hilary, the wildfire season has been exceptionally bad this year all across Canada, but at least in BC we've had rain this week to help calm things down.
Rick, I'm gradually getting used to the editor, though there are still things I have to stop and think ... where did I find that feature last time? A lot of it is far from obvious!
Hello Ian. Feel for you jibbering around with Word Press. Best of luck.
Denise, I seem to be getting the hang of setting up pages. Now I need to figure out the blogging side that I've studiously ignored up to now.
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