Nothing to See Here…

I’ve been on an ADVENTURE! Weeeeeeeeeee…..
It all started back a few days ago when I decided to kick this blogging thing up a few notches.

First, I used Yahoo to register justlinda.net. A whopping $2.99. How easy was that? Wow. And once the registration was confirmed, I went to their Register Control Panel and set up a masked forward in three easy clicks! I was excited… embarking on such an adventure! My own domain name and when I typed in the URL, it so seamlessly brought me right here to justlinda.blogspot.com.

After that, I did some research on the various blogging tools, comparing Blogger (which I’ve been using for several months) to Typepad and WordPress and Movable Type. I decided that WordPress seemed the best fit for my requirements. Hold on tight! Here we go….

I then decided if I was going the WordPress route, I needed a host. So, back to Yahoo and I read up on their hosting. Here is where the roller coaster ride is at the precipice getting ready to make a 200′ near vertical plunge. I thought Yahoo! Major player! Must be a good choice! You can’t go wrong choosing the market leader, right? Ha!

I signed up. I upgraded my account from a Domain account to a Web Host account. One of the first things that happened when I upgraded - no Domain Forward. The functionality I had as a LOWER end customer disappeared when I upgraded! Somebody forgot to tell Yahoo what the word UPGRADE means! Can one of you write them a letter, ’cause that was very frustrating to learn. I tried to write them a letter, but everytime I clicked SEND, the system just hung - forever and ever and ever and ever. Grrrrrrrr…….

I was trying to get all my little Yahoo duckies in a row and I’ll-be-damned if one of the steps didn’t require me to provide my Yahoo Security ID. Ha ha! I’ve had my Yahoo account since sometime in the 90s and pretty much all I do is check email. I have no idea where my Security ID is or how to find it, so I clicked that attractive blue link that said “lost security id?” and that friendly Yahoo screen said “check your email immediately! we’ve issued you a 1-time use ID”

I checked my email for the next hour and nothing. So I clicked the little blue link again. Still nothing. The next morning, I clicked that link one more time. No email. Now there are 3 one-time-use security keys running around on the ‘net somewhere that did NOT make it to my mailbox. Hurry! If you find one, it might be your lucky day!

Being a little worried, I decided to contact Yahoo to ask for advice. Their “contact us” link makes me go through all these online help resources before I get a damn form to fill out so they will help me. I diligently click the “send a copy of this to my mailbox” and click SEND. Ha! Send does NOTHING! It takes me to a white screen and no message ever seems to go. No confirmation or copy in my inbox to let me know it’s gone. I can’t get help! I’ve tried it several times!

So I decide not to worry about the security ID thingie and just get on with the blog transfer, right? Who cares if some hacker is out there with my security ID shopping up a storm at geeks-r-us dot com. I just want to move the fucking blog over.

I install WordPress on my newly set up Yahoo site. Easy enough! Grab my blogroll! Weeeeeee, I’m flying! I start playing around and find the IMPORT option. It has a tool!!! To import all my existing blog posts! AND EVEN the comments! How cool is this?

Of course, I was so damn excited that I started the import right away (I didn’t want to be slowed down at ALL by putting THOUGHT into it! No, not me, I jump right in!). A couple of times, I got an error during the import. I wasn’t sure what to do, so I do what all the dumb people do - I clicked it again! And again! Ha! Guess how many copies of each post were ultimately imported?

Once all the posts are there, I spend time deleting all the duplicates. And then I wanted to categorize my stuff, ’cause that is one of the selling points - love the categories! So I make up a few not-very-witty categories and started going through my posts one by one to change them from the default of “uncategorized” into one of my not-witty categories. About half way through, it struck me that - wow - wouldn’t it be much smarter to change the name of the uncategorized category to something that represents my catch-all category? I’m impressed that I thought up this brilliant idea while I still had some time to benefit from it. It would be much more my style to do all the work of manually categorizing and THEN come up with the time saving idea.

Anyhoo…

(I hate that whole anyhoo thing. But it’s like the American Idol audition series, I just can’t stay away no matter how awful I think it is.)

So the blog is over there at justlinda.net (which, by the way, isn’t yet live so don’t bother trying to bring it up) and the content is there and the categories are in place. Woot!

Then I start messing with the LOOK of it - the template. People like me should NOT be allowed to do such things. I have no business mucking in the code (hello? do you SEE the colors on my existing blog? ha!). I did look at many of the templates available from the WordPress links and found some pretty pretty ones and tried them on for size, but of course I wanted to make them prettier and prettier (gotta get my fingerprints on everything) so I started mucking around. Dude. Bad idea.

Late yesterday, I gave up on it all. Screw it.

And here I am posting the most boring drivel right here on my current and active blog and you know what?? All I can think about is how the fuck I’m going to ‘import’ this individual post (and any future ones I make before I cut over) without reimporting ALL the stupid posts again (again!) and having to go manually delete the extras.

Sigh. Isn’t there SOMEONE out there who wants to take my money???? I want help! Waaaaaah!!! Either I’m way too smart for this stuff or I’m way too dumb. And if you like me even a little bit, you won’t even ATTEMPT an answer to that question in my comments.

So stay tuned, www.justlinda.net is coming soon. In the meantime, feel free to go visit that slut at justlinda.com (we’re practically twins, I tell ya).