Saturday, November 13, 2010

Blogging the Night Away

Well, considering the number of responses to my previous post, I figure that in my hiatus from blogging, I lost at least some of my following, so the move to a new domain became a no-brainer. I'll let you know once that's up and running, which should be by next week. To nobody's surprise, the domain will be rebeccarachmany.com and the title of the blog will still be Reality Overlaps.

I'll continue writing about the stuff I write about, which is community, online and off. I'm also going to write more about games than I did in the past, not because of the increasing interface between games and reality, but because I'm now in that industry. Yay! What could be cooler than having a job where playing games and watching youtube videos of people playing games is part of your job? I never have to worry about my boss coming in just as I am fiddling around playing a game again!

And, for a blogger, what could be better than having a job that is interesting enough to blog about?

But that's not what I came here to blog about today. I wanted to blog about blogging, or more specifically about my experience with GoDaddy. I decided to put my blog there, frankly speaking, because it was the easiest thing to do. My hosting is at GoDaddy, so whatever.

In the name of laziness, I also just picked out whatever their blogging package was, something called Quick Blogcast. Although I wasn't thinking about videos or podcasts, I thought cool, looks good enough. Unfortunately, it's really lame. I won't go into its lameness, because I didn't spend more than quarter of an hour fooling around with it. Why should I? I knew that in 10 minutes I could figure out Wordpress, so I wasn't willing to devote more than that to this thing.

But then I was stuck, because I had signed up for a year. So I called GoDaddy. They were great. They walked me through setting up Wordpress. They walked me through putting the domain name I wanted on the hosting. Twice, because I hastily pressed the wrong button. They refunded all the money from the lame blogging account and credited it to the new hosting account.

Then they asked me if there was anything else they could help me with today. They always do that, and I'm always stumped. I mean, if I had anything else, I probably would have mentioned it.

But looking at it now, I have to ask myself, why isn't this standard everywhere? Why doesn't every support call for every service I have always end with "Is there something else I can do for you today?" How many times have you hung up the phone and gone "Dang, I forgot..." It usually isn't with your hosting company, either.

GoDaddy offers really extraordinary service. It's unusual, considering what they sell and what it costs. I spend about $100-$150 a year on this kind of thing. In other words, I'm not a very big customer. I probably call them 3-4 times a year, and these are pretty low-cost people, so let's say that they are spending under $10 on service for me. Still, 10% of cost for customer service is money. And they know it's me, too, because I type in my customer name on the dialpad before they pick up, so they could relegate me to the inferior-service department if they wanted.

Bottom line, more power to you, GoDaddy. Ridiculous ads aside, the product is solid.

Monday, November 1, 2010

Back to Blogging

A combination of the following kept me from blogging over the past few months:
  • Being incredibly busy
  • Blogging twice weekly for the company blog (IOW, being burned out)
  • Not being able to figure out that Google has disconnected my blogger login from my mail/calendar login and that now I need yet more passwords.
I thought the whole idea was to have all my Google stuff in one login, but lo and behold, for some reason, Calendar, Mail and Sites are a separate login from everything else if you have a domain that is not gmail.com. I can't figure out the logic of this being different for @gmail.com mailboxes but not domain mailboxes.

Also, I can't figure out the logic of "Mail, Calendar and Sites". Mail and calendar, yes, but sites, why sites? Mail, Calendar and Docs, maybe. But Mail, Calendar and Sites? Do you know anyone who uses Sites?

Whatever. I'm back and now I am debating about whether to keep the account on blogger.com now that I no longer have the convenience of 1 login for all Google stuff. I'm thinking about moving Reality Overlaps to my RebeccaRachmany.com domain. I even started, but that's a whole new bunch of aggravating technical settings to deal with.

What do you think, keep it at blogger or put it on my personal domain?