I am absurdly proud of my new website. In a fit of misplaced optimism six weeks, or maybe it was two months ago, I decided to switch from InMotion hosting to Bluehost and update my website. Let me assure you my qualifications to do these things are minimal. I told myself, “hey, it’s not rocket science, I’ll figure it all out,” and dove in. These two tasks, not including any of the content, took somewhere between 80 and 100 hours. My first mistake was assuming that since I had done the original site on WordPress over six years ago I was competent enough to do it again.

Migrating the site to the new host was laughably easy. I erroneously took this as a good sign, an omen that this was going to take, at most, a week or two.

For those of you who have worked with WordPress, I can hear you all snickering and probably muttering under your breaths, “oh, you poor, silly fool!” WordPress is a lot like Microsoft or Photoshop, they are all big, sprawling, powerful software programs. However, WordPress’s documentation is all over the place. For example, they’ve switched to “block editing”, but there are tons of videos that still talk about “classic editing.” I laughed when I heard the block editor is called Gutenberg, as in, “it’s the greatest update since the printing press!” To me, it’s clear that WordPress is dominated by men who write software. Sometimes this can lead to elegant, practical software, and sometimes it can lead to WordPress, where everything can be done ten different ways and there are hundreds of ways to fuck it up. WordPress forums are filled with people who love to show off their arcane knowledge and superiority based on mastering a platform that will in all likelihood become obsolete when another website design company comes along with a better, simpler, and easier to use product.

Meanwhile, back on planet WordPress, I spent hours looking up the simplest things, like how to change the font in the theme I have chosen. You’d think you just scroll through a list of fonts and pick one, right? Wrong. WordPress uses Plugins to change things like fonts, or to add protection to your website, or to make editing easier—but wait! There’s a catch. Too many plugins can slow your site down, or cause problems with loading the theme. Choosing a theme is fraught with risks and pitfalls. Is it compatible with this version of WordPress? Does it have the features you’re looking for? Can you update the theme without losing the customizations you’ve done? Do the plugins that have what you want work with your theme? I swear I’ve spent less time comparing features while buying a car.

Don’t even get me started on subjects like Parent/Child themes, or the differences between customizing the theme templates or the page itself. JFC, it was the most frustrating, byzantine process, each victory marred by another problem.

I took a few weeks off, my head close to exploding. During that time, I realized I needed to update my photo, too, so I decided to learn to take headshots of myself. I already had a ring light (if you’ve done a lot of Zooming since COVID, you’ll know why. I got sick of seeing all the bags, wrinkles, and imperfections of my face) and I had Katie, who offered to edit the images. I got on YouTube. There were many, many, many (SO many!) videos on how to take a decent head shot. I started experimenting with my iPhone, my MacBook, and the ring light. Oof, another problem. I had to look at my face in a way I had not in a very long time. I had to strike a pose and take a zillion pictures from different angles with different light settings. Some were laughably bad, other not too bad, and a few proved to be usable.

Creating an image that reflected who I am became an entirely separate journey in learning to accept my face and how to present it in the best way. My generation was blessedly unselfconscious in front of cameras as children, but horribly self-conscious as adults in the age of selfies. I still see selfies as narcissism, but I had to have a face for the site. Oonce I found poses I was comfortable with, the whole process became easier. Katie changed the backgrounds and tinkered with the images to make them better, and taught me that pngs are the way to go.

Back to WordPress. Nothing good had changed. I decided to try another theme and during that process, I discovered the videos from a guy who explained WordPress in a logical, coherent way. Bonus: he has a fabulous New Zealand accent! He “cree-hates” templates and now I have a crush on him.

The end was in sight. I had designed and executed a new website, complete with images, links, and a layout I liked. I had already migrated the site to the new host domain, but for the life of me, I could not get the new site to show up online. I contacted Bluehost, and they informed me the DNS nameservers had not propagated. I know. I had to look up “DNS nameservers” too. I had instructions to go to GoDaddy, where my site is registered, and change them. They walked me through the steps. I checked after the required 48 hours and there was no migrating, no propagating, no nothing.

Here’s where this blog circles back to Lyme disease. Way back in 2018, when I started the website, I created an account. A few years ago, I bought lifeandlyme.com, and created a new account. You think I’d document or remember something big like that, but no. I documented nothing and remembered nothing. It took four days of checking everything before I noticed the .net and .com difference. I fixed that, and STILL NOTHING. I was beginning to think maybe this wasn’t such a good idea. Then, as I was chatting with bluehost yet again, I sent a screenshot with the URL. A sharp-eyed rep noticed the problem: the website migrated but didn’t update to the new URL properly. Propagation happened almost instantaneously.

I’m glad the whole process was almost comically difficult. I’ve learned the equivalent of a whole course about using WordPress and how to get a website transferred from one host to another. After my error was fixed and I could view my website, I felt like I had won the lottery (well, probably not as good as I would feel if I won like $800 million dollars, but I felt pretty danged proud of myself).

And so we have a new website, new images of my potato head, and a new blog. My gain is your loss, because a LOT has happened in two short months and I’ve been writing all about it. ***

***Caveat: When I reloaded my old blogs, a glitch appeared, slashes before every quote or apostrophe. Sorry. I am fixing it.