Housekeeping Aug 2025

I was down again, did anyone notice! This is getting to be a regular theme with publishing my blog. If I was actually trying to get somewhere money wise, I would not get very far. Well, I’ll just keep going until I figure it out.

The hosting company I chose to replace the first one, offers professional email one month free install, and I made the mistake and opted to check it out. Soon as I clicked on that link, it set it self up and opting to try and cancel that act, you just can’t. Even on their website they offer no joy on backing out, even though they have a page dedicated to the word cancel. The Internet is just full of crap like that and it drives me crazy. I clicked the, do not renew.

I contacted customer support and the little dude tried, but no joy. After spending an hour in the online account chat, waiting for him to return with a result, I determined, there’s a reason these hosting companies offer professional email services through a third party. After waiting 48 hours for a reset, that never happened, I decided to give it a try myself.

I read and I read and I read some more and I vaguely remember having to do this one time before and I was successful that time. However, this time, the cpanel support pages dealing with email settings, it was like reading another language. Well I guess technically it is another language. I made a couple of changes that seemed to look right; waited another 48 hours to see if I was right, but found I still couldn’t get email served up to my domain name.

If I can’t do that what can I do?

I went shopping for another hosting company. I saw several that looked like they would fit my needs and they offered great things. However, their renew pricing is a bit steep. Knowing this is all shared hosting, I thought, ‘what about free hosting?’ I set my search on that to see what I might pull up and the one I’ve chosen, seems to work just fine. There’s no customer service; like that has ever worked out well before.

I now have the domain name email and it is delivered to my email client (which means the SSL is active) and that was done with ease. Two paid hosing companies and I could not get that with either one.

Free hosting though wouldn’t let me use the, WP theme, Twenty Seventeen, like I normally would. That theme hasn’t constraints on file size of pictures, graphics and/or video uploads, and the hosting company being free, only gives a disk space of 500MB. When I tried to load the theme I found the Theme Options were missing. Research of that issue the common denominator for that behavior with that theme, is the hosting companies. I don’t know if using a child theme of Twenty Seventeen, would have fixed that, but I decided not to find out. Even though I could have kept it, I decided to …

Try new things.

I’m test driving WP theme, Simply Personal Blog, which is a child theme of, Personal Blogily. I’ve opted not have a hero page. The theme comes with a plugin to help with the styling and whatnot, but because of hard disk space constraints, I deleted it. According to the message I find on my dashboard when I log in, the theme designer does not like that.

I like the simplicity of the theme and that it is light weight, along with, it looked great right out of the box.

The hosting company offers default plugins. I deleted most of them, but I kept, Loginizer Security, Cookie Admin and Speedy Cache. I’m thinking about deleting Cookie Admin though, because I do not like that it collects IP address of people who accept or deny cookies. That’s just crazy. Also, it’s the pro installation and I found that I couldn’t style it as well as I can, CookieYes|GDPR Cookie Consent, free version. Both have the same behavior on the front end, but CookieYes, doesn’t collect IP addresses. It does work and it’s the reason I have the visitor counter on the front end.

I’ve been making webpages for different reasons since 1999. I began with FrontPage html editor and coding my own web designs. I always had a visitor counter, that did just that, count. It did not track. It’s great that I found that one.

Few days later after posting this:

I uninstalled the Cookie Admin; installed CookieYes, to make this website legally compliant. I can though make an account and monitor which visitor opts to deny or accept cookie settings. Of course I’m not doing that, that’s just crazy. It doesn’t matter anyway for this site, because I’m not monitoring traffic of any kind. Google on the other hand … 😉

I guess that’s about it for housekeeping. Until next update … I will be gathering string.

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