A few months ago I was having a few problems with my Internet connection and popped off a text to Andrew who runs the service. Normally, I’d get a text or call back immediately to let me know what the issue was, what was being done and when it he reckoned it would be fixed. But this time the text read I’m away. Call their support on 08x-xxxxxxx.

I assumed this meant call the company who provide the backhaul. It wasn’t. I got through to a west Brit accent who gave his name as Robert. Nothing else. No surname. No company name. Just Robert. He did however tell me my ISP had been taken over by the outfit he worked for and they were trying to integrate the two services but were having difficulties.

Over the following weeks, from another couple of calls to Robert and a lot of detective work I discovered the main difficulty: Andrew had had a business partner who somehow owned a greater share despite investing less capital. This partner had sold the business out from under him. (I can’t say much more as I just learned a court case is in the works. I really wish I could, and I will as soon as I can, because it will shock you. Trust me. I’ll be able to use the real names for individuals and companies then too). I also learned Robert’s second name and the name of the new company. Well part of it.

I couldn’t find a website and searching the Companies Registration Office website yielded little as I had only part of the name. No ISP with a similar name was listed on the Kildare.ie Network, on the Government broadband site or on any of the private listing-sites. My IP was still showing as Andrew’s company, however his website had been closed down and displayed only the Apache welcome page. This bit bugged me as I could no longer access my account info or log a support ticket. Plus I had been using Andrew’s SMTP server for outgoing mail and this was now unreliable.

Robert no longer took calls or answered texts. The money was coming out of my account each month but service was, to put it bluntly, as reliable as a baby’s arse. I had no-one and no where to complain to.

Before you ask the obvious, no, I couldn’t switch to a different provider. It isn’t possible. The local exchange was broadband enabled a while back but I am too far from it. Satellite is not within my budget and anyway it is, to use the technical term, total crap. Wireless was the only option and Andrew’s transceiver was the only one within reach. Kudos to the man, he didn’t charge a premium knowing this.

Yesterday I ran my checks again. My IP was registered to Robert’s company. Easy to find a website then. My joy was short lived. A 2 page site showing a welcome message, a coverage map and an email address. But at least I now have an email address and know the name of the company I’m dealing with. Better still, I have an address and landline number for the guy who registered the website, so if Robert still refuses to respond to calls, he is going to get calls from me, and I don’t care what time of the day or night that will be. I will be asking/demanding three things: invoices for what I paid since they took down Andrew’s site and disabled online billing; the return of stable service and tech support; a rebate for the months of suffering the equivalent of dialup speeds.

This has to be strangest situation I have ever been in. Not knowing who was providing my service. No-one willing to offer information, no even names - Andrew because of a policy of non-cooperation and Robert for reasons unknown.

Flirty made a plea for help in a comment on my previous post. She wants to set-up her own domain and move her blog there. Now we’re all nice folks so we’re going to help aren’t we? Of course we are. So this is the way it’s going to work: I will set down some stuff here. You will add to it. This includes lurkers - yes, you too - just use a valid email when commenting or else I will end up trawling through Akismet spam to retrieve it. And that will make me angry. You wouldn’t like me when I’m angry.

Anyway, Flirty, the first thing to decide is why you want to move. If you are happy with blogspot.com then stick with it. If something’s not broken, don’t fix it. Self hosting will cost you money. It may not be much depending on how you go about it, but blogspot.com is free.

Okay. So you really do want to move. Grand so. The next step is to purchase your domain. I used Register365. There are many others. For example, Register.ie. Do a Google search. Some will be cheaper than others. (Maybe some reader can offer advice on selecting a registration service).

What type of domain would you like? .com, .net, .ie and so on. I had a preference for either .com or .ie but went for .com for two reasons: .com is cheaper! It cost’s me €9 per year plus VAT whereas .ie is about €70 plus VAT. Also, .ie requires a lot more paperwork. You have to prove you are eligible for one by posting off a bunch of documents. I could possibly have afforded it financially, but I just didn’t have the patience to take on the bureaucracy and wait ages for the domain to go live.

Registering primalsneeze.com was painless with Register365. Within hours it was live. By the way, I paid for 5 years in advance. Be careful about this - some registers will not warn you in time you that you need to renew your subscription and some nasty type could come along and hijack your domain. The dog has promised to nip my ankle on 21 April, 2012 to remind me. I just hope he doesn’t forget. Maybe I should get a pet elephant instead.

Another thing to bear in mind when buying a domain is that the purchaser’s name and other details are automatically made public. Bang goes your anonymity. To get around this you could have someone, or some company, act on your behalf. The snag with this is it could cost, plus they may be viewed as the legal owners of the domain. A really cute-hoor method would be to do what Twenty Major (being an extremely cute hoor) did and use the services of a proxy registration outfit. Similar to getting someone to act on your behalf, almost 100% guarantee of remaining anonymous and almost legal.

The next step is to select a company to host your site. I went for Hosting365 for a number of reasons. As pointed out by Tom Raftery via Kav, they will host your blog for free for 1 year. After that, they may charge. If the dog says the fee is too much I’ll just move. It’s up to him though.

Right. Just stop clicking on all those links and listen! You can come back to them later.

Okay. Grand. I’ll continue. Now bear in mind that what Hosting365 say on the blog for free page is not totally correct. They don’t actually provide WordPress for you. You’ll have to organise that yourself. More on this below.

Another reason I went for 365 is that Hosting365 = Register365. Same company. So I figured the process of getting the domain and having it assigned to a host would go more smoothly. It did. A bunch of emails arrived with passwords and links explaining (most of) what I needed to know.

The main advantage with 365 for me is that my ISP buys their broadband service from them. So for all intents and purposes I have a direct connection to my site, which makes editing so much faster. A skip and a jump instead of a Grand National-esque effort of getting to a server in the US.

So now you have your domain and you have it assigned to a host. From this point, until your blog is actually up and running, things get messy in a techie kind of way. If you aren’t willing to read lots of help pages, aren’t comfortable with the thought of having to create a database and other tricky webby things or aren’t up to figuring out stuff as you go along, well call your mate, the geek and have them take over. If you don’t know a geek, the nice folks over at WordPress have a solution: They will do it all for you! Isn’t that great? You just give them the link to your host’s control panel, your login name and password, and a little time and they will install WordPress for you.

As Flirty claims not be a techie I’m going to assume she will use her local friendly geek or the free install service. I will not go through all the geek stuff about doing it yourself. I can later if anyone’s interested.

Okay. WordPress is now up and running. What’s left to do? A few things..

The main/obvious thing is to bring all your old posts and comments over from blogspot.com. This can be painful. To my knowledge, blogspot.com has no export facility. There are hacks to get around this but then we’re back to needing a geek. Maybe someone knows an easy way to do this. Do ya? Huh?

In my case I had already moved from Blogspot.com to WordPress.com. WordPress.com has a facility where you just plug in yout blogspot.com URL and your login details for it, and WordPress goes off and imports if for you. Moving from WordPress.com to the new site was easy as WordPress.com does have a export facility. Just download to your machine. Go to your new site and import.

So an easy workaround might be to set-up a WordPress.com temporarily. Note that you may need to manually enter your links, but you can leave that until the new site is working rather than entering them in the temporary WordPress.com blog.

I getting tired so I’m going to finish up now. I’ll add more later when I think of it. But before I go just one last thing: If you want to use a different template or fancy plugins you are going to have to learn how to use your host’s control panel to upload them. This is something I will definitely add more info on later.

Oh, and another last thing: Make sure the templates you use are compatible with the version of WordPress you installed (or had installed). I made this mistake and comments got placed under the wrong posts. Very funny reading them, but not really the point.

Moving the site from WordPress.com to my own had me very excited for a few days there. Maybe it’s a man-thing or a techie-thing, but I was as worked up as a lorry-load of leprechauns at a mini-skirt convention.

Okay, there were so many things that should have worked but didn’t. In the corporate world these are called challenges. I call them problems caused by fekers-who-don’t-publish-proper-help-files-and-have-out-of-date-info-on-their-website.

I drew on all my training in software engineering processes and planned everything meticulously. Then I seen the virtual mini-skirts and all that went out the window. I went at like a pig at a potato. Big mistake. You’re supposed to learn by them aren’t you? Well, then that makes me a fekin genius.

A big thanks to Eolaí for slicing the spud with some very useful advice and suggestions. And good luck to Bock with the move to his own site. I’m looking forward to seeing the new gaff.

• There is a new poll opened. It runs inline this time so you won’t be redirected to PollDadday.com. One of the great things about being able to use Javascript and Flash.
• Mo Rogha has been updated to a pretty nifty table. You can now sort it by clicking on the headers. This may be overkill right now, it might be useful when the list grows.

So I have all the gizmos, gadgets and go-faster-stripes I could ever want. Now all I need is to be able to write something readable. There’s always a snag isn’t there?

Sorry about not posting for a while - I’ve been up the last few nights nursing a very sick database. It is getting better. A bit of a cough, but nothing serious. We may both get some sleep tonight. I need it. I’m more tired than the Michelin Man.

The database is just 3 days old, by the way. Ah, shur, they’re gas at that age.

Anyway. Why am I posting now? Well, just to proffer a word of advice to you kids out there:

If you are thinking about moving your blog to your own domain on a hosted service without technical help - DON’T!!

It is hell! Even if you (think) you know what you are doing, like mise. So many things which are supposed to work, don’t. Everything needs to be figured out as you go along. Help files, I hear you say. What help files?, you hear me ask. In my case all three entities involved pointed me toward their user forum.

I can’t complain. I can’t sue. I can’t do anything, because the services were all either free or very low cost. But seriously, what kind of builder, for example, would build your house and then when you ask for information about where he ran the water pipes, would suggest you chat with your neighbours?

Maybe this shouldn’t be a post in itself. Maybe I should have just commented in my post for feedback on how folks find using Web 2.0 applications.

I need help. Okay, okay. I hear ya. Regular readers have been thinking that for ages.But I do need some help from you guys. Nothing too serious or difficult.

I’ve been lumped with doing a paper on the usability of Web 2.0 applications. In this context, Web 2.0 means Blogger, WordPress, Flikr, Feedburner etc. Get the idea? Tom Raftery has a good list here.

I would really appreciate it if you could leave your views as comments, or mail me if you wish, at primalsneeze at topmail dot ie.

The kind of thing I’m interested in (but anything goes - I’m leaving it up to you) is how easy/difficult do you find these tools to use. I am more interested in hearing from non-techies, but also welcome feedback from fellow geeks too.

For example:

I don’t like WordPress.com because I can’t use javascript. I had a javascript stat collector on Blogger and I miss it now.

I find Google Reader great because I don’t have to trawl though my favourite blogs to see what’s new.

I was able to being using Flikr immediately. It was so obvious what to do I didn’t need to learn anything new.

I’d love to have a banner on my site just like so-and-so has. But I can’t figure out how to do it. The help pages are no good.

I’d love to have a fancy animation on my site just like so-and-so has. But I don’t want to have to learn new stuff like messing with CSS or javascript (whatever they are).

Any input would be a great help to me. Depending on the feedback, I may be able to build a hints and tips page. I suspect some folks will read comments and say wow, I didn’t know you could do that!

Update>> In response to a comment and some mails received:

I have a personal deadline of April 25 for this. But as it is something I am interested in professionally, I would still love to receive feedback after that. Indefinitely.

If you wish to remain anonymous, use that option when posting your comment.

This paper is not for publication. It cannot be made public without my, and the sources’ (your) consent. No blogger’s details will be used. I will follow a format along the lines of many said they had problems with blah-blah while one said they found blah-blah easy to use because ….

<<End Update

Everything has a password or a PIN* these days. I have PINs for bank cards, my house alarm (and three neighbours’ alarms), one to reset the car radio, a PIN and a PUK for my phone. I’ve go a PPN (which used to be a PRSI number), a student ID number and one for online banking. I’ve got six email accounts with different usernames and passwords. Logins for a few webservers. A login for my ISP’s account server. A login for Google, Statcounter, Polldaddy, about ten job sites, WordPress, Blogger, Irish Independent and more. A WEP key for my home network. A voicemail code. And on top of all that, there are account IDs for clients’ machines.

All of these, we are warned, must never be written down. We must memorise them and eat the slip of paper they came on and possibly shred your crap, just in case. You never know what geek has hacked into your pipework and hidden a poo-cam in your loo.

My fear of forgetting one of these, passcodephobia, (not to be confused with passcodaphobia which is a fear of going to the toilet after eating fish - the bones you know) has been getting gradually worse.

Passwords are not too bad. I tend to use about ten base ones in a variety of combinations which gives me about 50 unique codes. Numbers I remember by directions or shape. 9713 is a square. 0856 is up, up, right. Get the idea? Try it on your phone.

Yesterday I cracked. For the first time. I could not, not matter how hard I tried, recall my phone PIN. Having exhausted everything from isosceles triangles to down, outside, left-a-bit, I had to resort to getting my PUK from the website and resetting the PIN. No big deal. No harm done. But now my passcodephobia is worse than ever. If I forgot a PIN I use frequently what about all the others.

My head is just too full of codes. It can’t take any more. Now what’s my WordPress password so I can post this?

*Have you ever noticed how we all say PIN number? Personal Identification Number number. And we say Automated Teller Machine machine.