A funny thing happened on the way to write a blog post. Yes, I know it’s been almost a month since I posted here. And shortly after I posted the last item, I logged in to WordPress.com to try to add another post—about my experience with the new iPad, which I received for my birthday.
That’s when I discovered my blog had some major problems. Forget the enhanced images in the iPad; I couldn’t see any images on my blog, including the header. I quickly concluded it was not a browser issue; images didn’t load in any of the three browsers I use.
Eventually I figured out that images on some, but not all, WordPress sites were also not loading—it seemed to be a problem with some of their servers, yet no one else had experienced the same problem. So it was something to do with my computer and network, but not anyone else’s, and it only affected WordPress.com sites.
Flash forward three weeks. I switched to WordPress.org and a new host, after toying around with both Blogger and Typepad (which offered quick fixes, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to stick with those blogging platforms for the long run). I really hate using a third party host—I have absolutely no desire to see the nuts and bolts of my blog; all I want is the pretty pictures. And words, of course.
But everyone has to grow up sometime. And this fledgling website needed to grow a bit too, and expand its possibilities.
Most people, and until recently, me included, don’t realize there’s a difference between WordPress.com and WordPress.org. You can read about the differences here; but basically, WordPress.org is not hosted by WordPress, so you need to get your own host. Dreamhost has been extremely patient with my questions—and believe me, if you curl into a ball when you see the acronyms DNS and MySQL and FTP and get hives at the thought of propagating, you probably don’t want to switch to a hosted platform.
I’m still mopping the sweat from my brow, having successfully propagated my site’s DNS. I reposted my photos (thankfully, only a few) after the transfer turned them into mirrored images (don’t ask). And yesterday, a chance comment I made to my husband helped us unravel the mystery of what happened to the site in the beginning. When I told him the issues started about three weeks ago, he realized that was about the time he installed new firmware to our router.
He un-installed the firmware, and voila! Images on a WordPress site we were looking at (which had prompted the discussion) reappeared.
If I’d mentioned the date to him earlier, we could have avoided all this angst. But then I wouldn’t have a shiny new WordPress.org account, with all its possibilities. And I would never have learned what all those acronyms meant.
But for now I can concentrate on writing again.