The world is racing by me. I can’t keep up. As JFK said, “Life isn’t fair.” But if my biggest problem is that my blog site is out of control, I shouldn’t complain too loudly.
You know how many emails you get everyday? Well, it’s the same with me. So I delete a lot of them without even looking at them. Groupon, Jockey, Golfsmith, Dick’s, Amazon, Facebook and GoDaddy. Ping, ping, ping, ping. They disappear as fast as I can hit the delete button. I get rid of political stuff just as fast. I have decided that sending $25 to some political hack is not going to save the world.
GoDaddy supports my blog site. And, it turns out that 90% of their emails were trying to sell me something. However, for the last few months, they had been trying to warn me that they were going to shut down the GoDaddy platform that supported my website. They kept trying to notify me and I kept deleting the message without reading it. Ping!
Something caught my attention one week before blog doomsday. I was going through my emails and GoDaddy’s subject line said, “Important Message.” That saved me. If I hadn’t taken action, all of my previous blogs would have vanished. So in the eleventh hour we transferred my 244 blogs over to my new “platform,” WordPress. I’m sure that WordPress is good, but I just can’t make it work for me.
For example, I used to get one or two comments whenever I posted something. It’s really great to know someone is out there. Of course, I have to approve the comment before it is published. I wrote a blog entitled, “It’s a German Thing” and it set out some problems I had with the German people. One comment I received and promptly deleted was from a German, who in familiar Deutsch gave me the finger. Now, with WordPress, the damn comment has reappeared.
Since switching to WordPress, I had been receiving 170 comments a day. Of course, I can mark them for spam or trash, but it is extremely time consuming and frustrating. Almost everyone was spam and trying to sell something (on my site!). I was overwhelmed with spam. I tried to figure whether there was something in the WordPress settings that would help me. I finally found a place where I could put “comment blacklist” words. If the proposed comment had one of these words in it, then it would not pass GO, but would go directly to spam I studied my submitted comments and found that 60 to 70 % included Louis Vuitton. So I put four items on the comment blacklist: Louis Vuitton, babyliss, Michael Kors and louboutin. Guess what? I have had only six requested comments in the last two weeks!
Under my old GoDaddy Quick Blogcast system, I had a place where people could subscribe to my blog and whenever I published something, they would receive an email of the blog. I also could check statistics and see how many hits RiceQuips had had in the last day, week or month. Heady stuff. Now I am flying blind. And to make me completely irrelevant, Google can’t find what I have previously published.
I’m going to brag for a moment. I actually had posts listed on the first page of Google. Now, they are way back on page 12 and if you click on it, it comes up “Not Found.” I have been told that Google is a creeping search engine, so it will eventually find me. It’s been two months. I wish it would creep a little faster.
I have been told that Google Analytics is the best place to get statistics, but now I can’t log on to Google. I registered with Google about three years ago. Google insists that my password is wrong (I wrote it in a book and I am looking right at it). So I told them that I lost my password (not true), and then, they insisted on texting me my password. I don’t text. I know, I know, I’m a dinosaur. So for my last chance, they asked me to tell them when I opened my Google account, AND, when was the last time I was on it. I didn’t have a clue to answering either question.
If my air conditioner stopped working, I would get professional help. If my car shut down, I would get professional help. Get the picture? You know those commercials where they say, “Don’t try to do this at home.” Well, that’s where I’m at. I have found someone who is going to fix me up. My old subscribers will again be getting my blogs by email. New subscribers will too. I should also be looking at some statistics! Life may not be fair, but for goodness sakes, don’t sit on your hands.
Written by PJ Rice at www.ricequips.co
Copyright 2014