Technical difficulties

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I no longer can send posts out by email. My hosting provider insists that I pay for Constant Contact, and even then I am skeptical that it will send to any of my existing subscribers.

Also, I have this garbage at the top of the page, and my hosting provider says that to get rid of it I have to pay for customization services.

This is a really bad time for me to be trying to deal with these issues. So bear with me.

9 thoughts on “Technical difficulties”

  2. In the 20 years that I’ve had this web site, until last night I spent a total of less than 2 hours talking to tech support. As I recall, they spoke English and resolved problems.

    Over the past month, errors have cropped up that never happened before. Users could not get to pages because of configuration errors. Email subscribers to this blog were not receiving emails (that is still an issue). Etc.

    I spent between 10:30 and midnight last night on the phone, mostly on hold, and got hung up on three times with issues not resolved.

    Finally, at 1 AM, through a support chat window I found someone who didn’t tell me to just clear my cache and actually seems to have solved the configuration problems at the server end. And he was able to restore access to comments, which had been lost. But he could not solve the email problem or help me find a wordpress “theme” that doesn’t force me to put a gigantic image at the top of the blog page.

    My guess is that my old hosting provider was bought by another company. I suspect that I need to find a new company, but the migration task is daunting, and I have a lot of other stuff on my plate right now.

    • WordPress migrations aren’t that brutal (I’ve done a few for 3ps). There is almost certainly a plug-in for WP that lets you send mail via a commercial bulk sender like Mailgun. The Constant Contact suggestion was not really suited to your needs (it’s for things like marketing mail).

      Thank you for this blog.

  3. I’m grateful that you keep this blog going. It’s a treasure. Thank you

    • @Arnold – This is the best idea.

      Wordress.com is by FAR the easiest, cleanest, never-touch-it-again path for hosting wordpress these days.

      Their support is all English speaking – via instant chat – and very very good.

      I’ve done dozens of WordPress migrations from “100s of vistors” sites to “millions of visitors” sites.

  5. This seems like precisely the wrong time for providers to try to pull these kinds of stunts, with Medium and Substack available.

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