Attention Hobby Bloggers!
Usually, hobby bloggers solve blogging problems themselves on a daily basis depending on their skill level and on how complex the problems are.
Hobby bloggers, don’t read this if you can solve all your internet and technical issues with your free blogging platform, WordPress.com, Blogger, etc.!
The Problem With Spam
(Five years ago)
I wasbeginning to feel jinxed as I struggled technologically to blog. First I had my problems just learning the ropes, then I started jumping unannounced and uninvited into people’s spam boxes. That all came to a head when WordPress.com shut me down for cutting and pasting in a spam comment that had a spammy Gravatar into one of my posts.
Yikes, I sailed to the end of the world and fell off the internet safety web.
Note: (The solution – appeal to WordPress.com. Fortunately, they reinstated my blog.)
Landing In Spam
(a few days later five years ago)
Considering my spam troubles, I was almost afraid to write comments. Tonight I had no comments pending, and four comments sat in MY SPAM file. Guess what? Three of the four SPAM comments were MINE! hahaha. Good think I checked.
Moral of that story – Check your Spam file from time to time.
Second, when I set my WordPress.com account up I linked it to MY Facebook account so my posts would share to my timeline automatically. I also manage a Facebook account for San Joaquin Valley Council for the Social Studies, which also had a personal Facebook account.
Note: (Organizations should NOT have personal FB accounts. I deleted the account this year even though it had about 500 followers. Create a page or group for organizations or both.)
Somehow all my posts from my WordPress.com website were published on that account as well. So I pressed x on that Facebook account under the Sharing Setting on my WordPress.com account. I was surprised to discovered that I had 198 followers on Facebook who showed up as statistics on this website. I have no idea how that happened!!!
Note: (WP.com lists the number of FB followers you have if you publish to your personal account or page whether or not those friends visit your site.)
The Cost of Solving Blog Problems on my Free WordPress.com Site
We live in the country where internet service is at a premium.
So I thought you might want to know what happened because of my disaster. (My website was removed from the internet.)
Vince likes to keep me happy, and blogging makes me happy. Instead of making me wait until Wildblue fills my gigabyte food bowl again, he bought me two gigabytes of service to tide me until the next service month. We answered emails and comments together for a half hour, and he checked the gigabyte meter. Without downloading anything, we had used one gigabyte of data.
We hadn’t pulled up any pictures, visited any outside websites. So we went to his office, and I quickly published the post I worked on last night from 12:00 – 2:40 a.m using the company’s cheap unlimited data plan.
Gigabytes of data are free out in the country where we live and unlimited from 12:00 a.m. to 5:00 a.m. local time. Then I answered emails in the evening for about forty-five minutes. Poof, the other gigabyte disappeared into our internet provider’s ravenous cyber tummy.
At that point, I got messages like, “Your email has not been sent.”
So Vince called Wildblue and insisted that a few emails do not create even megabytes of information, let alone gigabytes. One gigabyte equals 1,000 megabytes. Even photos can be done in megabytes, and I avoided photos. I sent my Foothill Magazine friend a link to my post instead of sending photos. The technical support person agreed with V, and credited our account for the 2 gigabytes, and gave us unlimited gigabytes that should go into effect by TOMORROW NIGHT until they figure out our problem.
Meanwhile, I waited until midnight to start writing my posts for the rest of the week, and It took until about 12:20 for even Wildblue’s normal unlimited gigabytes to kick in. I couldn’t get on even with the modem directly connected to my computer. Vince pressed some magic buttons, and after about 20 minutes he was able to pull up my screen.
To Wildblue’s credit, they helped us. Thank y’all for being so patient and visiting me when I haven’t been able to visit you back for about the last week or more.
Internet service is part of the cost of both professional and hobby blogging. Solving problems ate up my internet data.
You Won’t Like This Problem
In addition to writing every day I try to read a fair number of blogs, and I was in the habit of pressing the “like” button because I couldn’t comment after I WordPress.com banned me from the blogosphere. So, I tried pressing “Like.” Even though my blog had been restored, I couldn’t like anyone’s work. So If you thought I didn’t like you, you might have been wrong.
Note: (That problem cleared up on its own, and I do not remember why or how.)
Most of the problems I had when I started blogging in 2012 had no overt solutions. Vampires roamed the cyberworld freely creating havoc in the night. Poltergeists ravaged blogs while we slept. Then just as mysteriously elves picked up the pieces and reassembled your blog so they were again usable. c
There was no logic in how a blog fell into disrepair and how it cleared up again.
Conclusion
Are WordPress.com blogs still vulnerable today? I still keep my account active so that I can speak to WordPress.com issues as well as WordPress.org. I have not experienced any problems recently, but I have five years of experience. I’m not pressing my blog to do what it can not do. I have much of my material saved and reworked and republished in this account. I am not so vulnerable.
There is a touch of that mystery that still surrounds the way blogs work. When they get too overwhelming, I have the help of a web developer, Daniel Renteria, who corrects my wrongs and straightens out my website to keep it functioning. I’ll be introducing him to you soon.
There are millions of hobby bloggers using WordPress.com. WordPress.com users published more than 595 million posts and more than 457 million comments in 2016.
What problems do you have blogging? Where do you turn for answers? How can Always Write meet your challenges and be a better blog?
Marsha Ingrao - Always Write 
12 responses to “How Bloggers Solve Blogging Problems”
Great post as always Marsha. While we’re on the topic of weird blog stuff, I have 2 problems with your site. First, when you reply to my comments, I get the notification just fine in the top corner notifications on my blog, but when I reply, from there it won’t let me, I have to come directly back to your blog to reply. It’s always been that way since I began following you, just didn’t mention.
Another thing you may want to check to avoid losing readers, when I come to your site, it takes quite some tine til your page loads, all the time. If it were anyone else’s blog that I wasn’t friends with, I’d leave, so thought I’d mention so you could look into. I’m willing to bet your images may be too big which causes the lag in load time. 🙂
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Thank you so much Debby! Most of my images are resized, but my Canva.com images are not. So I’ll work on those! I will also mention it to Daniel. I had a very hard time this morning, and I couldn’t get it to load at all. I was sick! But that seemed to go away on its own. I called Blue Host. The other thing that has been weird has been that it did not publicize to my social media for about a week. I had to reconnect them even though they were already connected. So many glitches. I will also mention the comment thing to Daniel. I hope he can fix that! Thanks for your honest feed back, Debby. You know I appreciate it!
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I’m happy to help Marsha. I know these glitches can be a pain, but I always appreciate if someone lets me know about problems too. I”d rather know and fix than let lots of readers just leave. 🙂
And PS. once again I had to come here directly to reply. It still wont take replies from the notification comment 😦
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Daniel us checking into that. I’ve also contacted Blue Host and Jet Pack. Thanks again, Debby! Hope I can get it fixed. ??
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It’s interesting to read lately how many bloggers, regardless of their platform, are having minor and major issues. I may have shared my story with you (in a blog post, too). I started by WP dot com blog in 2011 but didn’t do much. I had no idea what i was doing until I “restarted” the blog in 2014. Thank goodness for Blogging University 101, etc! With the help of a friend, I set up a website for my consulting business in 2015 through a self-hosted site. Using wordpress dot org was so similar to my blog that it was relatively easy to use. I learned a lot about codes and other useful info, from her, that I eventually incorporated into my blog. Even with that confidence, when I self-hosted my blog for a few months, the issues began (like losing ALL my images!). I have to say the wordpress team was amazingly helpful. With so many millions of bloggers, it’s not surprising there are all these issues!
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Terri, It was great talking to you today. I learned so much. I look forward to collaborating. I signed up for the Food Bloggers Conference. 🙂 How fun! 🙂
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I have often suspected hijinks. I do use photos, but long ago, I did all my blogging (DAILY posts!) with 1 gig per month. Now I use 5 gigs in less than a month. A few more photos, but a LOT fewer blog posts (only 1 per week!). I have asked and asked. When I used VErizon, it was horrible b/c I could not tell when I was running low and overages were far more costly. Now I use StraightTalk (I know, Verizon again) but at least when it’s gone, it’s gone. 😦
I go to the library to do heavy lifting, though, such as videos. Don’t do those at home! Haha!
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Good advice, Katharine. I have gone many places to do my work. We pay so much for internet! 😦
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The spam folder is a funny thing. Every so often I find a familiar face lurking in mine instead of in my comments folder where they belong. If I release them things usually return to normal the next time they comment.
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Unless it’s Ralph. He never was able to climb out of my spam folder on my Always Write blog. Now Debby Gies is there, too. This is crazy. And now my name doesn’t show up after the twitter symbol when they retweet my posts. 😦
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Your post was interesting to read. I’m just a hobby blogger with a free WordPress site, and luckily I’ve had no disasters with Spam, etc, yet. I’m more likely to need help with the smaller things, which are second nature to most bloggers, but often stump me, such as sorting out my categories, adding menu headings, changing my theme. I try and solve these problems by myself by trial and error, but often tear my hair out in frustration! I’ve also found that lots of experienced bloggers will give help when asked.
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Great comment, Georgie. Yes, I struggled with those things as well. You remind me! They weren’t as funny to me as getting caught in the spam folder, and eventually I solved them. I couldn’t solve the spam problem. You are so right about more experienced bloggers helping out. Most of the experienced bloggers I ran across were about two or three weeks more experienced than I was. 🙂 We sort of ran in a cohort. Then a few of the cohort either stayed on and have become close friends, or disappeared – either from my world or from blogging altogether. I can sense a post coming up here, and I don’t want to do that to you! 🙂 Thanks so much for your engaging comment, Georgie. 🙂
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