The Grand (Failed) Experiment

My regular visitors might be wondering what happened to my website. Specifically, why the look has changed so much and why the URL is different.

Allow me to explain.

Earlier this year, after much research by my husband, we were convinced that a self-hosted WordPress.org blog would be superior while maintaining the most important part of WordPress.com to me — the community. It would add a lot of flexibility and supposed ease of maintenance. So we went for it.

Me knowing absolutely nothing about how this stuff actually works, my husband spent days setting everything up and transferring the content over. He spent several more days testing and configuring plugins to try to restore the functionality from WordPress.com that wasn’t working. After about a week, he had it pretty close.

Then the problems started.

Plugins would randomly stop working. The blog would randomly go down, sometimes for days at a time, for no particular reason. Posts would disappear or show up twice.

And each time there was my husband, spending hours he didn’t have trying to make it work. After a while, the WordPress app on my phone stopped working on the site, and that further complicated things. He never could fix that one.

I also noticed that after my blog was moved, unlike what we were led to believe, the bulk of the community didn’t migrate with it, and most of them were lost in the shuffle. This was the hardest for me, as I had come to lean on the friends that I met here as a support group, something I desperately need.

We were faced with the growing problem of the WordPress.org blog. It required a lot of manual maintenance to keep it running. Which I don’t have any clue how to do, and my husband just doesn’t have time to keep doing.

So we decided that we were going to move everything back.

Unfortunately that’s much easier said than done. But I’m sure that you’ve noticed a drop off in my activity on the site over the last few weeks. Part of this was intentional as my husband was planning the move.

However, these last few weeks have been very difficult for me and my husband. I have had a migraine that’s lasted over two weeks so far, and because of that, I haven’t had many opportunities to write and maintain my at home therapy schedule. In addition, a number of personal issues wreaked havoc at home and online.

Most of it has been sorted out now, so it seemed like as good a time as any to rip off the bandaid so to speak and come back home to WordPress.com.

Today, my husband brought this blog back online and took down the other one. He also spent most of the day setting things back up for me.

Unfortunately, due to the way the other blog was set up, he can’t transfer the contents without manually reposting everything, something neither of us has the time nor patience to do. And in the move, I ended up losing most of the blogs I was following. So this will be something of a new start.

Now I’m back home. I probably never should have left to begin with.

Oh well.

At least now the app on my phone works again, and I don’t have to worry if my blog will still be here the next time I’m on. And my husband will be saved from tons of maintenance and repair tasks.

I look forward to rediscovering old friends and finding new ones along the way.

© Sarah Doughty