I woke up this morning wondering what I could most effectively do whilst looking after M (who is recovering from a work accident) and I thought ‘I know, I’ll actually get round to writing a blog post’, which would have been my first blog post on this otherwise empty existing site. But then I remembered that our web hosting provider is shortly to stop providing web hosting so I thought ‘well, there’s no point putting content here just to move it, so I’ll just switch to a new hosting provider and THEN I’ll write my blog post!’.
So I made M a cup of tea and chose a new hosting provider and decided the most important thing was to make sure that M could still get his emails after the switch, and so I searched the help files and realised that none of them really covered the exact situation I was in so I started up a help chat. I was assigned to a chap who was all ‘you need to set MX in your name provider and don’t forget your DNS and your DNS is what you need to set with your name provider and your name provider is where you set your DNS’ in not-very-good-at-all English. And actually I KNOW what a DNS is but I couldn’t understand a word of what he was telling me to do and I strongly (and correctly) suspected he didn’t understand my specific situation so I thanked him and ended the chat and made M a cup of tea and started up another chat.
This time I got through to New Person and New Person took more time to understand my situation and told me to log into my cPanel, and I told her I didn’t have an option to log into my cPanel, so she told me where to find the link to my cPanel and I told her it really wasn’t there, so she sent me a link and I tried it and confirmed it didn’t take me to my cPanel so she asked me to clear my cache and try on Chrome, and I asked her if I really needed to clear my cache if I was going to try a different browser and whether clearing my cache whilst I was on a web chat to her was really a very good idea.
She didn’t reply, because we got cut off.
So I made M cup of tea and tried in Chrome and – lo! – there was my cPanel, and I changed a few settings but it was all totally different to my previous admin area and so I started up another help chat whereupon I was assigned to Third Person. Third Person initially told me it wasn’t possible to pass me back to New Person but after about a minute of trying to work out where I’d got to decided it WAS possible to pass me back to New Person, and New Person talked me through the rest of the process. Thank you, New Person. I gave New Person good feedback. And made M a cup of tea.
And I updated the name servers for four domains and I waited for them to propagate and waited for them to propagate and sorted out our wonderful Sunday lunch and ate that and waited for the name server changes to propagate and cleaned the kitchen and reminded M why he couldn’t access emails and made him a cup of tea and fetched him a pillow and waited for the name server changes to propagate and then got very excited because M’s domain was back in action with the new provider. So I recreated M’s email addresses and tested them and set them up on his iPhone and set them up on his iPad and set them up on his laptop, and I created a simple landing page for his website (because it really wasn’t worth the effort to bring his old one across) and by this time *my* name server changes had propagated so I made M cup of tea and set up WordPress and told myself I’d pick the first theme that was vaguely suitable and make do with it.
I didn’t pick the first theme that was vaguely suitable and make do with it. Instead I found a really nice theme and I spent some time searching royalty free libraries for images that matched my bio (trees and books, as it happens) and played around with the colours and menus and got it looking all ‘me’ and activated it – and discovered it looked miserably bad on the iPhone. So I made M a cup of tea and picked the first theme that was vaguely suitable and made do with it.
And by now it was gone 9pm and my eyes were dry and gritty so I made M a mug of cocoa. And wrote this.
And that is the sorry tale as to why I didn’t actually write my blog post…