Category: Techie stuff

Posts relating to the running of blogs, plugins etc.

July 19, 2014 Marketing, Techie stuff Post a Comment

MAKE YOUR BLOG YOUR HOME PAGE

…AND CREATE A BLOG TAB

For a while, my website’s front face was my static “About” page. Interesting only to those who already knew me. But I preferred to set my blog as home page. Trouble was, whenever I tried to set up my blog as a home page, I was missing a tab. That meant, as soon as I navigated away from the blog, there was no tab to navigate back to it.

So here’s a quick way to solve this problem.

Go to  Add page. Add a new, empty page you call “Home” or “Blog.”

Move to Appearance/Menu. If the “Home” or “Blog” page doesn’t already appear on the right with your other pages, add it to your menu, and move it into first position.

Open the “Home” or “Blog” submenu by clicking Page (with the tiny arrow on the right-hand side).

This opens a handful of fields. Into the field labeled “Navigation Label” write:

<a href=”http://yourdomain.com”>Home</a>, if you called your page “Home,” or

<a href=”http://yourdomain.com”>Blog</a>, if you called your page “Blog.”

Save.

If all is well, this should have done the trick.

June 26, 2014 Marketing, Techie stuff 9 Comments

GUIDED TRANSFER TO WORDPRESS.ORG – Part 2

Guided Transfer – Part 2

(for a quick check list, see below; for part 1, click here)

Moving your blog to WordPress.org isn’t straight forward. The easy way is to let someone do it for you. But even that is not all that simple. Without a Guided Transfer For Beginners manual, it’s tempting to give up. Don’t. If I can do it, so can you.

Enough chitchat. So how do I move my blog from WordPress.com to WordPress.org?

I officially paid for the Guided Transfer on a Friday. They scheduled it for the next Tuesday, warning it would take 24 hours. In the meantime, there should be no downtime on my website, but they asked me to not make any changes during that time.

The Happiness Engineer got to it in the evening.

Indeed, he was quickly done, of which I was informed by email. The email also gives you a link which you should bookmark, together with a new password for your account. BUT I had to wait 40 hours (up to 72 hours in some cases) for the changes to “spread” across the Internet.

This is important. It means that while the transfer only took 24 hours, you can’t do anything with your website until the changes have spread. Apparently, this means it will take that long for the Internet to understand that, next time you type “www.yourdomain.com,” you want to go to the new website and not the old wordpress.com site.

[It’s worth noting that so far, I have not come across anything a specific website called WordPress.org. I think the whole WordPress.org stuff is a myth. 🙂 Not that it matters.]

I noticed the transfer was complete when the number of followers on my website had changed. That’s because it no longer counted facebook and twitter followers – only my blog followers. The link the engineer gave me connected me to a wordpress login site, looking just like the one I had used before. I tried logging in, but it seemed I had the wrong details. Before writing to the engineer in a panic, I deleted my chache (=my Internet history and my cookies), and finally it worked. Upon logging in, a dashboard appeared, which looked very much like the old dashboard, just snazzier with a few extras.

By the way, the website itself looked exactly like my old one, too. That is one of the things the engineer tries to do for you, so your followers and visitors never experience any “downtime.” To help with that, the engineer installed my first pluging called Jetpack Plugin for me. It provides many features, most notably the same “stats” feature, “follow” feature and “follow by email” feature I had on my .com site.

I could even use publicize again, the feature that lets you automatically announce your new posts on facebook, twitter etc. Trouble was, by connecting to it, I had to connect to my old wordpress.com site. So I logged into facebook and twitter and google, but my dashboard was no longer the snazzy new one. Where had it gone? (Whatever you do, don’t post anything until you have your new dashboard back!)

I logged out and tried logging in again, but the “wrong password” message came up once more. I deleted the cache TWICE, and finally, my new password was accepted. Phew.

Guided Transfer comes with a two-week service period, during which time the Happiness Engineer will be at your beck and call with questions and advice. Still, the engineer’s email recommended to take advantage of Vaultpress, at least for the first month after initial installation. Vaultpress keeps backups of your website, so if in your exuberance to tinker with your website you mess something up which you cannot fix, you can simply restore an earlier version (and try again). They even offer the first month for free. To me, this made sense.

That’s when I ran into more techie trouble. I paid for Vaultpress lite. To set up, they asked for something called SSH and FTP. I’d heard of FTP before (whenever you upload something), but that was the extent of my knowledge. You can find both on your host’s website (in my case the Bluehost website). But honestly, this was far outside my comfort zone. I sent another request to my lovely Happiness Engineer, asking if the whole techie stuff ever got easier. He replied, “No, it doesn’t get easier. What does get easier is knowing where to turn to for answers.”

With that comforting bedside manner, it’s a wonder he didn’t choose to be a doctor. 🙂

He got in touch with his Vaultpress.com colleague, who set Vaultpress up for me. I didn’t have to do a thing.

Finally, the email included a link to Akismet. That’s the same feature that stops spam messages as I had on my WordPress.com site. I didn’t need the link, because it was right there on my dashboard now, and I merely had to click to activate it (if it isn’t there, ask your Happiness Engineer about it).

Since then, I’ve been learning new things non-stop. I’ve played around with the layout, even picked a new theme. I’ve found a few plugins that might be useful, among them Google Analytics, Yoast, and Mailchimp.

As complicated and frustrating as all this has been, don’t give up. The engineer really tries to help you. Thanks to him and his advice, I know that, even if I mess up my lovely website, everything should be recoverable.

Guided Transfer tl;dr

ADVANTAGES OF MOVING FROM HOSTED (WordPress.com) TO SELF-HOSTED (WordPress.org)

  • Plugins
  • More control
  • Option of selling your books/services from your website

SIGNING UP WITH NEW HOST

  • Sign up
  • Check on the store section on your wordpress dashboard to unlock your domain and receive Authorization code
  • Enter code on new host’s website and follow instructions

GUIDED TRANSFER

  • Pay
  • Wait for your email informing you of schedule
  • Remember not to plan any updates for up to 96 hours (24 h for transfer, plus 72 hours for change to take effect)
  • Once transfer is complete and the changes have “spread,” clear your cache and log in
  • If needed, re-connect to social media

VAULTPRESS AND ASKISMET

  • In case of trouble installing Vaultpress, pay, and then ask the Happiness Engineer if he can help you out
  • Click on Akismet link to activate

For everything else, ask your Happiness Engineer. Many times, if necessary.
Good luck!

June 18, 2014 Techie stuff 3 Comments

GUIDED TRANSFER TO WORDPRESS.ORG – Part 1

Guided Transfer – Part 1

Preparation
(for a quick check list, see end of Part 2)

Moving your blog to WordPress.org isn’t straight forward. The easy way is to let someone do it for you. But even that is not all that simple. Without a Guided Transfer For Beginners manual, it’s tempting to give up. Don’t. If I can do it, so can you.

I’m an author, preparing for the moment when my first book will be released. More than that, I’m a blogger. It gives me joy if people comment on my posts, especially since I put a lot of effort into them. After having been with WordPress.com for a while, I became jealous of other websites that had fancy plugins. I didn’t really know what plugins could do and how they worked, but whenever I wanted my website to do something, I was told I needed a plugin. And WordPress.com don’t to plugins.

So I wanted what all the cool authors had. A WordPress.org site.

I already had my domain name, also hosted by WordPress.com. I had all the tools I needed, right? Before embarking on anything techie, I usually read up on the details. I studied several instruction manuals, checked out websites from people who had experience. Within a few hours I knew I wanted to use the Guided Transfer service offered by WordPress.com. Much less complicated.

Much less complicated doesn’t mean not complicated at all. At every turn, my lack of knowledge became ever more apparent.

During a Guided Transfer, a Happiness Engineer will be transferring your files, i.e. your blog posts, your scheduled posts, your pages, your stats, your blog followers etc., but he will NOT transfer the domain www.yourname.com. That’s an important difference.

Before I paid for the Guided Transfer, I needed to pick a new company to host my website in future. I chose Bluehost. WordPress recommended them and I heard good things about them.

So I paid my money, expecting everything else to take care of itself. It doesn’t. Bluehost offer all sorts of extra services, like security certificates to certify your website is free of malware, but it’ll take me months to find out what they all do. Anyway, so they had my money. Everything else was up to WordPress’s Happiness Engineer, right?

Wrong.

A couple of days later I got an email from Bluehost, reminding me the next payment for my domain name was due. It’s important you keep up payments, because once you let ownership of your domain lapse, you most likely won’t get it back. Or at least not for a price Joe Average can afford.

When I first joined WordPress.com, they had registered the domain name with a company called Wild West Domains. Bluehost gave me the choice of continuing to pay Wild West their yearly fees, or move my domain to Bluehost. There was no pressure.

I figured it made sense to have it all in one place, so I followed their link to the transfer site (there’s also a handy button on their website called “Transfer”). It informed me of two things. My domain, held by Wild West Domains, is locked, and I need an EPP Authorization Code.

At this point I wanted to cry. What’s an EPP Authorization Code? I found a contact address for Wild West Domains and asked them for information. Their response was they needed some information from the person who registered the domain before they could do anything. Yep, the tears started to trickle. I sent a support request to wordpress.com, since they originally registered my domain, hoping the Happiness Engineer would take care of everything.

Here their reply: ”We don’t transfer the domain to a different register during a Guided Transfer. We change the name servers to point to your host if the domain is purchased with us.”

I didn’t know who was pointing why and where. The tears were flowing now.

I’ve since found out that this means they will NOT deal with the domain at all during the Guided Transfer. What they will do is, once I have moved my domain to Bluehost, they will make sure that my website still links to my domain name, whoever is hosting it.

Ever resourceful, I rifled through my email account to find the original email sent to me when I signed up with wordpress.com. Bingo. That email contained a link. Guess where it took me? To my usual wordpress.com store on the dashboard. All the information was right there!!! I unticked the box labeled “locked” to change it to “unlocked,” then I clicked the button asking them to send me my authorization code.

A few minutes later, I received the code (in my spam filter) at the email address I registered with. Heartened, I copied the code they sent me into the Bluehost’s EPP Authorization Code field. To do that, I had to log in to Bluehost again. I simply clicked on the handy link at the bottom of the “Transfer” page. Bluehost then sent me another code (for verification purposes). I copied that code into the next field on the Bluehost site.

I think it worked. Well, something happened.

I was taken to another page which gave me the option of doing some “pointing” to something or other. I left the ticks at default, because I still had no idea what that meant. But I remembered the engineer saying that they will be pointing something at something, so I figured, if leaving it at default was wrong, they’ll probably sort it out for me. Anyway, Bluehost told me the transfer of my domain might take a few days.

This was all preparation for the big day. I hadn’t even paid for the Guided Transfer yet.

To find out how the actual transfer happened and what further surprises lay in store, click here to see end of Part 2.