Deborah Woehr

Last week, I had to jump through hoops to start the transfer process for WBA and thought this was going to go smoothly. I’ve never transferred a domain before, and after the crap I’ve been through the last ten days, I never want to do it again.

Back in February (approx.) SBC Yahoo decided to delete my account when they reformatted their system, forcing me to sign up with Gmail. Fine. I changed my email address on all of my websites via the C-Panel and billing. Everything was updated, I thought.

Apparently not. I’m still not clear exactly what part of the domain I didn’t update, but I’m thinking that it might be the “Who Is” portion. I don’t know. The managing director of my webhost was very unhelpful.

To shorten this story, I now have to wait two days before my email address change “propogates.” Then I have to wait another seven days while the transfer goes through again.

Have any of you tried to transfer a domain from one host to another? If so, did you experience these types of problems?

I don’t know how many of you stopped by WBA this morning. If you did, then you might have seen my announcement. If not, then I tell you here because the site went down due to a transfer process. I’ve resigned as webmaster from that site and am in the process of passing the torch to John Evans of Syntagma Media.

Like I said on WBA, he was instrumental in helping me with this site. I asked John about his plans this morning, and he told me that he was going to keep things pretty much the way they are now, adding a few more features later on in the month. What these features are, he didn’t say. We’ll just have to wait and see.

In the meantime, I’m going to finish Prosperity while pursuing a freelance career in copyediting and copywriting. If any of you need the former, let me know. I’ve been proofreading documents for 20+ years and have developed a great eye for typos and awkward sentences.

My nose has been buried in my writing projects, giving me little time to work on the Murder&Mayhem wiki that I had started in July. I had quite a few pages on there, but nothing too significant. Tonight, I decided to check my stats to see if this subdomain was getting any traffic and noticed a foreign hacker forum linking to M&M.

Hmm? I thought before I decided to check out the site. It’s gone. I have no idea when the hacker came and went. I’m glad I didn’t have much on there because I’d be really upset right now.

Oh, well. Back to the drawing board.

I first heard about this site a couple of months ago, but never though to pursue it until Marti told me how much fun she was having with it. Last night, I decided to check it out.

Squidoo is basically a site for creating hubs (lenses) for various topics. As you know, I love ghost stories and anything related to the paranormal. The Supernatural blog I’ve been writing for John has been very successful, thanks to my posting about Waverly Hills Sanatorium. So I decided to create a lens about that.

Waverly Hills Sanitorium

What I didn’t realize until after I set up the lens was that I had originally misspelled “sanatorium” on the blog and now on the URL of my lens.

I woke up this morning and found a comment from Fred, alerting me that WBA no longer existed. Yesterday, I received a very angry email from a visitor, stating that he had spent 30 minutes trying to post a comment to a post and kept receiving a message that his site was invalid. Have any of you ever experienced this when trying to post a comment to that site?

At any rate, the Absolute Write nightmare flashed before my eyes. I thought he’d complained to my ISP and that they had shut WBA down without any notice to me. As it turns out, that wasn’t what happened. My domain had expired and now they have to renew and propagate it.

What a way to start the morning.

Update: It is up and running again.

How do you guys like the new look of this blog? I’ve always liked the 3-column themes because I can organize them better. But if you liked the desert theme I had before better, let me know and I’ll switch it back.

I’ve decided to revert WBA back to its original theme for the time being. A link is broken somewhere and I can’t figure out which one it is.

My research site is now live. However, I’ll be playing around with the features until I learn how to use a wiki. If you’d like to find out exactly what this site is going to be about, click on the link below and read the Introduction.

Murder and Mayhem: A Research Site for Writers and True Crime Buffs

I need to rant for a minute. I’ve spent the last couple of hours tweaking the new theme for WBA so the Almighty Internet Exploder will be happy with it. The only thing I needed to do was change the font and the font size in the sidebar and the posts.

I’ll spare you the details except to say that it went from bad to worse. Now, I’m looking at WBA on my Mac’s version of IE. The graphic of my original theme is not displaying in the header. It did when I first modified it a couple of months ago. Now, it’s not and I have to figure out why.

God, I hate these stupid browsers!

Update: It seems that Internet Explorer Mac doesn’t like any of my blogs. They’re all screwed up. I couldn’t tell you what’s wrong. However, I was able to get them working on the PC. The link headers are too big on the WBA site, and I haven’t yet figured out how to fix that. I’m going to leave things alone for a few days so I can gain a fresher perspective.

I finally found a WordPress theme that works in Firefox and Internet Exploder for the Mac and PC. Even better, it’s writing-related. Woo-hoo!

The headlines are a bit funky looking on IE–not surprising since that browser sucks. But I’ll get to that tomorrow. Gotta write.

Oh, before I close, check out the latest contest on WBA. This one offers a cash prize!

As many of you know, I’m a big fan of ghost stories and anything related to the paranormal. Starting today, I’ll be writing for John Evans’s Supernatural blog. You’ll find plenty of topics about ghosts. However, I plan to include other topics such as psychic ability, the occult, and and how different religions view the afterlife. I hope to see you there!