Kudos to the WordPress support team!

With all due respect to GoDaddy, with whom I have dealt now both in chat and on the telephone, WordPress is the best.

I guess I’ll go ahead and dish about my (really pretty nutty) experience in moving from wordflorilegium.wordpress.com here to my new site at word-florilegium.com… who knows who might be interested, right?

It all started with me being self-conscious about having ads on my free WordPress subdomain site. I was worried they’d bother readers. Also I wanted to play with plugins.

What I should have done was simply upgrade to the Personal Plan on WordPress.

What I did instead was take what looked like a better deal: Basic Managed WordPress courtesy of GoDaddy. Now, I’m not here to fully disparage this plan. It’s heller cheap, and it works… almost.

When I set up my dot com through GoDaddy, I realized that comments weren’t functioning properly. There were actually comments on my posts, live on the site, which did not appear in the comments menu of my admin dashboard. Nor did they appear in the notifications dropdown.

There were more problems. People couldn’t follow. My posts weren’t appearing in the WordPress Reader… I’m not sure what all was going wrong, to be honest. I tried to fix what problems I managed to identify with various plug-ins. It got complicated.

I communicated the problems I was having with GoDaddy in support chat, and they tried to explain some options… but quickly threw up their hands and referred me to their toll-free hotline. The agent who handled me on the phone seemed fairly knowledgeable, but also fairly unable to help me.

So I went to WordPress and tried to do what I should have done in the first place: get their Personal Plan. I purchased the plan, indicating that I already owned a domain, and promptly became bogged down in a quagmire of weirdness about DNS, Domain Mapping, and sundry other stuffs of which I know jack squat.

I had previously purchased from WordPress a redirect for wordflorilegium.wordpress.com to point to word-florilegium.com, and now I had purchased the Personal Plan. But the Personal Plan was active on the subdomain, not the dot com, and the subdomain was redirecting to a third, misspelled subdomain.

Meanwhile I had two accounts on WordPress – one set up through GoDaddy, and then my original one. At least I think that was the way of it. I’m not even sure. If all this sounds confusing to you, then you and I are on the same wavelength. I was befuddled, looking at screens like this:

dns

Fortunately, due to having purchased Personal, I had access to WordPress Support Chat, which is magical. Clicked it and – open sesame – there was someone there who was clear, focused, kind, cool… who readily comprehended the mess I was in and set about immediately to hands-on sorting it out.

The fix was this: my redirect was removed, and the Personal Plan was removed too. The agent then sent me a link to a page with a one-click purchase all set up to use the credits on my account to buy Jetpack Personal, and guided me through installing it on my domain and using it to connect my domain properly with WordPress.com. Abricadabra.

I even got some money back from WordPress on the whole deal.

I rest my case. WordPress is the best.

Fingers crossed no further major issues with GoDaddy…

Come see me!

-Dan