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New website, again

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I've been an Earthlink customer - for home internet, for home networking, for web hosting - since 2002. But for the past few months, I've been unhappy with that relationship.

The big problem was that my DSL connection just started pooping out. I called it in, spent lots of time troubleshooting it, and even replaced the modem. I could never get EarthLink to even admit that there was a problem. Nonetheless, the internet connection became unusable.

As far as web hosting is concerned, things have gotten cheaper. $10 a month wasn't bad, but some folks charge half that or less.

I bought a domain name, jlarue.com, a long time ago, through another company. Then, a few years back, I moved to Google for email, which required some odd gyrations with EarthLink mail server settings.

Then I got to thinking: my website had been whittled down to a few links and just a little text. Why not just move that content over to my blog, and make my blog the website?

Advantages: the preservation of eight years of content. No more hosting fees (blogger is free). A more dynamic web presence. Some encouragement to blog more often, maybe.

Disadvantages: it looks more like a blog than a website. OK by me.

So I've moved over the content that matters, tidied up the links, backed up everything, and done a little investigation about how to point my domain name to blogger. I'll try to wrap that up tomorrow. Then I'll give up on EarthLink, a company that just never took me seriously. And incidentally, save $120 a year. It might make my life a little simpler, too.

P.S. 11/29/16. I did finally figure out how to configure Network Solutions to point to Blogger. But it still required a text verification field, provided by Google. After changing that, it took a while for Google to get the updated change. Once verified, I saved the new "custom domain" name in Blogger. Of course, then I found that I could not search for my domain at all. I imagine it takes a while for the domain name to propagate across the internet. ... And it's up. It took about two hours for the change to take place.

P.P.S. I also had a little bobble with my email - but Google helped me to set up mail records on my domain server. I think I'm back up. Sorry for any interruptions between yesterday and tomorrow.
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Anonymous said…
It is always nice to get a fresh start. I think the problem for most people who want to start a new website when they already have one is all the effort required in shifting their content from one place to another. There are some options that make it easier to shift blog posts and so on. Congrats on your new site!
February 1, 2017 at 1:02 AM
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