Hosting for Keeps

After a mere 2.5 months of opting for the WordPress premium hosting package, I'm already feeling buyer's regret! I'm really hacked off by the lack of Google Analytics integration and not inclined to triple my original payment to upgrade to business hosting.

So, what are my options? The first and most obvious is: choose to live with the restrictions - for at least another 9.5 months. That's like having a third pregnancy! I don't handle that kind of timescale well. The second option is also obvious: pay for the business upgrade and suck up the huge expense. My budget is extremely tight, right now, and that's not something I really want to consider. The third and final option is: move to self-hosting with an independent web host. That's going to be a regular headache of choosing a cheap package, repointing the domain name, dealing with my site stats tanking for up to 24-48 hours at least, and trying to get a refund on the remainder of my WordPress subscription.

To be honest, none of these 3 options are filling me with joy. I think I might look into the hosting options and then decide whether it's worth the hassle and whether I can live without Analytics for longer. After all, I managed without for nearly 10 months on the free WordPress account... it's just so tantalising when I'm focusing on pro-blogging to have such a useful tool almost within reach but not quite there. (It's also really annoying that it's super easy to implement on my secondary Tumblr blog. Analytics, Quantcast, you name it and I can stick it on my Tumblr blog.)

I think I kinda know what I'm going to do in the end. I just don't want to face it right now. I have a lot of background issues that are taking higher priority over blog admin. Even this post is a bit of displacement activity - in a rather cryptically therapeutic way!

Tags, Labels & Blog Fables

Once upon a time, there was a little blog with short daily posts. After a month, the posts grew into longer, more intermittent entries. After a year, it grew into a large, healthy blog with lots of lovely posts on many different (but interrelated) topics.

When the blog was very little, a few tags and labels were enough. As it grew older, it became clear that this was insufficient and that the blog needed more tags and a wider range of subject labels.

So, dear readers, the blog owner will have to take the time to go through all the old posts (67 published and at least 2 pending) and reorganise the entire lot. When one has a fledgeling blog, however small, one really should look to the future when said blog is likely to become a big grown up blog and one really ought to prepare a sufficient range of tags and categories in advance!

WordPress Logo & Favicon

I've updated my brand logo, to better reflect the flow of our journey. I remembered to upload it in multiple locations - so many social media accounts, TpT, Ravelry, and various other places... Except I completely forgot about my actual website! :o

My new logo! :)

Never fear, after much circular clicking I have, in fact, located where to set my main logo - which automatically gets used as a favicon. It turns out, you have to go into the actual WordPress general/settings page and upload your shiny new logo. (I've spent about an hour getting sidetracked with Gravatar, which does nothing to your website logo, so I hope this helps someone!)

I do believe I'm all set now. :) Well, until the next web link I stumble across and do a double take at my old branding. lol