After yesterday’s little fiasco, I have been thinking about what to do. While the problem was something easily fixed for now, I’m concerned that in the future, it might not be quite so easy. And I’m going to be honest–the new blogging platform that WordPress has released is a nightmare. I really don’t know what they were thinking. Thanks to a tip from a fellow WordPress blogger I can get in okay now, but if this is anything like any other site I’ve used, that will be temporary. It all has me concerned.
Why you ask? Because there is a bunch of stuff on it that looks more like they are gearing their site towards a “pay to blog” scenario. Some of the stuff in the new drop down menus is of absolutely no use to me or most other casual bloggers. It’s also much more technical. I used to a little bit of web design back in the late 90’s/early 2000’s and this stuff is even beyond that kind of stuff. I have a feeling there is going to be a shift at some point and all of us that are just doing this for fun could be pushed out. Last time I checked, it was $300 a year in order to use their pay service. Uh…as much as I love blogging and all, this is a hobby, I make no money off it. Not paying to do it if I don’t have to.
I’ll be honest–I’ve never been a big fan of WordPress to begin with. It’s glitchy, a pain in the neck and not very intuitive AT ALL. I had previously used Blogger and I would have originally had the blog there, but I couldn’t get the domain name I wanted as someone already had claimed it. Of course, that blog is dormant and hasn’t had a thing posted on it since 2011…(insert huge eye roll here). It has like 6 posts on it, and should probably be purged. But, I’m in a completely different position than I was back in 2014 when I started this venture. I have regular readers and followers and if I decided to move and made it clear that’s what I was doing, I would hope that many of them would follow me to wherever I end up, regardless of the domain name.
Also–apologies to anyone who might have wanted to leave a comment here yesterday and was not able. I had changed some stuff in my settings, not realizing it would make it impossible for anyone who didn’t have any sort of social media account. Again, another failure in WordPress to actually SAY that in their site. I have changed it back. My reason for doing that was because I have literally been INUNDATED with spam mail from Porn Bots. It’s so disgusting, and I’m thankful that I have a setting on my comments that prevents those from going through because NO ONE needs to see that. Another reason for me to consider leaving WordPress too. Their e-mail filters leave a lot to be desired at the moment. I even have one regular commenter who cannot leave a comment without me having to approve it EVERY SINGLE TIME! I have no idea why it continues to do this, but it’s been an issue for an extended period of time and I can find absolutely no resolution to it. Ridiculous. I have also changed the settings to that you can no longer make comments on posts after 14 days in hopes of maybe eliminating some of the porn bot crap as well, it seems to target older posts. Yeah, it’s throwing them into spam, but I still have to see it when I do my house cleaning, even if you don’t. It’s just disgusting, gross and I’m tired of it.
Here’s what is going to happen hopefully, this could be subject to change at any moment, depending on what WordPress decides to do:
- I’m going to set up a new blog site and start working on transferring some of the data over.
- Once I get it to a certain point, I will share the new website address here on this blog.
- Goal is that by January 1st, I will no longer be posting anything new here, all future blog posts will be at the new address. In the interim, I may post any new posts at both sites just to make it easier and to save time in transferring them over at a later date.
- I am planning on taking the “best of the best” posts and backdating them on the new site. As I do that, the post here will be deleted.
Once I get things up and running at the new site and I’m regularly posting there, I will be shutting off all commenting on this blog. At some point, I will be deleting ALL of the posts here and only leaving the direction to the new blog site for anyone who might have missed it. Please note this if you maybe have links to some of my posts here on your own blogs. It’s entirely up to you if you want to do an update to the link on your site. Just letting you all know though.
Thank you in advance for your patience. This was not something I really wanted to be doing right now but it’s time. I’ve had enough of trying to deal with all of the crap that WordPress doesn’t want to address. I used Blogger for almost 8 years before I started this blog and never had half the issues I’ve had here. It’s not perfect, but I find it a much better thought out site overall. I will keep you all informed of what is going on as it happens. Posts here may be few and/or erratic in this interim because I want to devote my spare time to making sure everything is right on the new blog. But I do appreciate all of you that have supported this venture and hope that you will continue to do so!
