Hard life of a webhost migrant

AAAAAGH!!! What a day, phew, anyone would have to be pleased that it’s over and all completed, well almost all.

It has been the most difficult and time consuming project that has been tackled by me for many months, maybe even years. And when I say tackled, I mean exactly that because completing it was not down to me but my loving wife Lisa.

The project sounded easy, to migrate my blog – the one you are reading right now – so that it would become self-hosted because I had the bright idea that I’d also like to do a second, and less regular, blog about a specialist subject that would not interest many of more general readers.

As it was, while hosted by WordPress, I could not easily have a second blog without paying a lot more, so I started looking around for alternatives. Eventually, my searches led me to stumble over BlogTyrant’s site and found what he had to say invaluable and based on experience.

So, yesterday, I took the plunge and bought a three year hosting package with BlueHost. Yes, nothing more to pay on that score until 2018.

Having read quite a bit about it, moving from WordPress to BlueHost seemed quite simple. A couple of hours, no more, was the idea in my head.

Well, that is the problem. My head! It is not as though there are any issues here relating to MS, my cognitive abilities are fine, but the technical side of computers is well beyond me. So, armed with a total lack of knowledge, the battle began.

Surprisingly, despite my shortcomings, the domain was transferred very easily but, after that, the going got a lot tougher – although a computer whiz would laugh at my efforts. In fact, so would a five-year-old.

It was after two in the morning that Lisa took pity on me and decided she had better mount a rescue operation. At that point, the blog was offline, the theme that I wanted to keep was not installed, nothing was going right. It was a mess of my own making.

Fortunately, Lisa does know quite a bit more about computers than me; she has created and maintained websites in both the USA and UK. So, she set to work undoing what I had messed up and putting it right. We eventually went to bed about 4.00 in the morning but at least distinct progress had been made.

Work restarted after breakfast and I was keen to help but just one ‘look’ from Lisa told me not to get involved as my help would be likely to be more of a hindrance.

Soon, the site was looking a great deal better and, amazingly, I managed to transfer across all the archives, previous posts, categories and tags. Yes, ME.

Anything more difficult was still handled by Lisa as I don’t know one end of a codex from another and still have no idea what DNS is, but it cannot be that important. Can it?

Well, now the blog site is firmly with BlueHost and is working well – although Lisa is convinced there will be some glitches that will need to be fixed.

So, only one more thing to finish. Remember, I did say at the start that it was almost finished! Yes, that second blog still has to be created. Maybe, if I ask nicely, might Lisa take on that job? Without my ‘help’, it would be finished in less time…..much less time.

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