I was there at his bedside. I barely made it in time because the third form of cancer took him so fast, while the other two were in remission/dormant.
A guy in my old youth group also died around the same day. He wasn’t even old. Different cause, but still, dang.
To my dad:
A week of aggravation and banging my head against a wall, and now it’s running beautifully.
And doesn’t it look awesome with the WordPress 2016 theme? I don’t know why I didn’t upgrade earlier: It fixed the issues I had with the last one–namely, the lack of color in the links, and putting the sidebar on the left instead of the right! (Come on, we’re English-based, and read from left to right. The sidebar belongs on the right because it’s less important and needs to be read last!) It’s also even more mobile-ready than the last one, even puts the sidebar at the bottom instead of putting it into an icon people never click on.
It was that danged firewall in the WordFence security plugin, something they added to WordFence in the past several months. It doesn’t play well with my site, though the rest of the plugin works fine.
I replaced the core WordPress files with brand-new ones from the new version 4.6, and re-installed WordFence with brand-new files as well, but then forgot to switch off the danged firewall, which automatically goes into “Learning Mode.” And then by morning, the danged firewall was screwing it all up again.
Danged firewall.
But I re-installed WordFence and then immediately clicked off the danged firewall this time.
Maybe I’ll keep this site after all.
Okay, now I wake up and see a site which appears to be running fluidly again. Maybe I did finally figure out the problem.
But it took a week to do it, a week of not much else getting done. No reading. No studying. No researching. Very little daydreaming about my novel.
And yeah, I have family obligations to tend to.
Anyway, last night I went over to my old Blogger site and started adding some pages, to see how well that works. I have to do it one-by-one because while it’s easy to export from Blogger to WordPress, Blogger doesn’t play well with WordPress imports. You have to go through another site to convert your WordPress database, which I tried a while back, only to find that it didn’t work on my stuff for some reason. And you can only export it ONE MB at a time. That’s not much for a site like mine.
Still, Blogger would be my best option: I can indeed put my pages as well as posts over there, and they let you customize. WordPress.com won’t let you use Javascript (so no Analytics or more than a mostly-useless Statcounter, unless you pay $$), won’t let you post affiliate links (so no Project Wonderful ads), and then says, “All your content R belongs to US.” I’m not entirely sure if I could post links to my books on Lulu, though maybe.
However, because of the trouble importing, and the size of my site, and the huge number of internal links and anchors (those things which allow you to jump farther down in a page) which have to be converted, and the stripping of all my paragraph breaks, it would take considerable time and energy to move my site back.
If this website is now working again, then I will probably leave it alone, at least for now. But leave this open as a future option. I can give this self-hosted deal ONE MORE CHANCE.
But I tell ya, they don’t tell you when you do this, about all the long hours non-techies spend trying to troubleshoot their websites. It’s not as easy as they make it sound. Sure you can figure out things like FTP, which isn’t really that hard. (It only seems intimidating till you get the hang of it.) But when your plugins start acting up, or somebody hacks you, the trouble really begins.
Some googling last night brought up a bunch of blog posts from other people who have made the switch BACK to Blogger from self-hosted, or comments complaining of the long hours spent troubleshooting and maintaining. I also found a post which recommends non-techies think again before doing this. But most of the results switched my Google search terms around to going FROM Blogger TO self-hosted. Because who would want to do that? [facepalm]
Well, here you go, another blog post warning non-techies to think again. Unless you’re willing to spend extra $$ to a webhost who manages the site for you, such as WPEngine, which looks like it would be perfect for me–IF I had $30/month, which I don’t. Or you can pay somebody to manage the site for you. Or if you’re setting up a business website or a forum or some other such thing that needs more versatility than Blogger or WordPress.com can give you. If you want a page with order forms, shopping carts, etc., you’re better off self-hosted.
But just a simple website like mine, where the only “selling” directs people to third-party websites who do the orders/money managing for me, I could easily have stayed on Blogger.
So let this be one little blog post, in a Web full of posts extolling the virtues of self-hosting, which tells the truth to non-techies.
If you just want a personal blog/website showcasing your writing, which I have here, and don’t want to spend long hours troubleshooting plugin malfunctions instead of creating,
If you aren’t particularly technical, or maybe you’re good with computers but a page full of code and techie language makes your eyes bug out,
Then think long and hard about self-hosting. You may be perfectly happy with Blogger or one of the other platforms.
After the big crash nearly 3 months ago, I thought I had this site purring along like a kitten.
Then the past weekend came along and I discovered old problems returning.
After spending days and days tinkering with this website and trying to get it to work properly on both the front end and backend, I’m about ready to give up and go back to my old Blogger blog. I can easily set up redirects and let my hosting plan run out, so that’s no problem.
My site looks great here, and I have so many options–but that does me no good when I spend more time troubleshooting than working on the content itself. I have some tech knowledge, but a lot of that code makes my eyes bug out.
They tell you, go self-hosted! It’s best, and you’ll never regret it! Well, I don’t know about that, when I’m spending hours upon hours trying everything, following every bit of advice I can find on the Web, and still get a goofy site that loads up white screens or stripped-HTML every other pageload.
These site problems have also caused my hits–usually 200+ a day–to TANK.
Even if it is the server and not me, good luck finding it out. This host used to be good at helping me out, but lately all I get is, “We don’t do anything with that, so you have to sort it out yourself.” Or they can take weeks to respond to a ticket.
My church website has tech support. I have trouble, they sort it out. Three years and that site has given me very few headaches. It’s also free.
I have trouble here, I sort it out. Maybe. I have spent countless hours troubleshooting this site over 3 years.
I didn’t have this problem with Blogger. I had a blog there for years and did very little to it other than posting/editing content. It didn’t go down, didn’t take 20 seconds to load for unknown reasons, and unlike WordPress.com, they let you use Javascript and tinker with the template code. So I could set up my own redirects or track stats just the same as I do now. I couldn’t block people, but these days I don’t care about that so much. I didn’t have to worry about hackers, either.
I have a novel I want to work on. I have a family, a house to take care of–and, I’m now told, I have emergency family obligations to attend to because of my dad’s declining health. I don’t want to spend days, my head aching, my arms aching, worrying about my site and why it won’t work no matter what the frick I do to it, and meanwhile barely see my family or enjoy my usual pasttimes.
Screw this. I’m going to start tinkering with my old blog, writing up code to redirect to it, and see if I can make this big site look good back there again.
I’m a writer, not a computer geek. Sometimes I think, Would I be good at coding/tech support/IT? Or am I just better at it than the other people in my family/church? I look at coding and all the stuff the professionals do, and think, no, code just makes my eyes bleed. I get along with techies, with computer geeks, but I’m a writer. I want to spend my days taking care of family stuff and nights on studying/researching/writing. I want to write posts, not code.
Keep that in mind whenever you read the sites that say, Go self-hosted! You’ll love it!–Maybe you will, maybe you won’t.
Oh, yeah, and it costs a lot of money. I never had to pay for hosting with Blogger. Apparently my host is one of the cheap ones, too, and managed hosting (where somebody else fixes it for you, like my church website) costs even more.
Ever since I blocked the Unnamed Blogger (UB) [Lisette] last night, I’ve been getting steadily better. I still suffer from physical effects of last week’s anxiety, but I can concentrate better on other things now. I could swear this past week has been a blur; it feels like Tuesday was yesterday. It’s been a blur of fear and anxiety.
As I told my husband, it feels just like when my narc abusers found my blog and threatened me, all over again. The constant fear and dread of what will happen next, every move you make being watched. But since I blocked UB, UB has made no attempt to come back in through other means. So far.
Just knowing someone else can affect me like this, tells me UB is definitely a narcissist, turned into one by all that hatred of narcissists. Yet another reason not to let hate of the narc consume you.
I hope that will be the end of it now. I have so much on my plate: my dad’s health declining, house repairs, a cat who probably has cancer but we can’t afford the CAT scan to be sure ($1000!), church fundraiser, primary election, plus all the registration etc. for a child going back to school soon.
I don’t have time or space in my head for a new stalker.
It actually makes me feel a weird sort of fondness for my own pet stalkers, since at least they turned into just a little buzzing in the background. They’ve been well-behaved for years now. 😉
Update 10/3/21: These threats came, I believe, the day before (or maybe the day of?) my mom called to say my dad was dying very soon.
A recent post by PopeHat adds more legal legitimacy to what I did, and shows that Lisette had zero legal basis to threaten me. Now watch as I use Fair Use to quote him:
The United States, conscious of the dangers of libel tourism and pro-censorship legal systems, has enacted the SPEECH Act, 28 United States Code § 4102. The SPEECH Act prohibits American courts from recognizing foreign defamation judgments obtained under regimes that do not provide defendants with free speech protections as robust as those available under the First Amendment to the United States Constitution and the laws of the relevant states. American courts have found that there is “no meaningful dispute that the law applied by [Canadian courts] provides less protection of speech and press than First Amendment and [state] law. Canadian defamation law is derivative of the defamation law of the United Kingdom, which has long been substantially less protective of free speech.” (Trout Point Lodge, Ltd. v. Handshoe, 729 F.3d 481, 488 (5th Cir. 2013) (upholding refusal to recognize Canadian libel judgment under SPEECH Act). Any Canadian judgment you obtain against Mr. Loder will be worthless – both because Canadian courts lack personal jurisdiction over him (as also required by the SPEECH Act) and because his speech is clearly protected by American law.
While this case refers to libel, this concept of protecting all First Amendment Rights of Americans sued by foreigners, seems to apply across the board. I’m not a lawyer, but this is what I’m gleaning from here and here.
