So my old laptop was being held together by Sellotape (colourless, sticky on one side, plastic on the other) for quite a while, after it fell in half a few months ago, and towards the end of last week, my Dearest got an amazing four figure tax refund, and since my income all comes from the internet, I got to choose a laptop from the second hand shop. It has a mouse pad that works properly and all the keys on the keyboard press down (well, the letter P is a bit sticky but is still works most of the time).
In the process of transferring everything to my new laptop, I of course had to re-type all my passwords, so Chrome could save them. WordPress would not accept this. I checked and re-checked (using “show password” on my old laptop), and the new laptop just wouldn’t login to WordPress. When I tried to reset my password, it refused to accept the correct email address. Twice.
Then, after several days, as suddenly as it stopped working, it just let me reset the password as if nothing had ever happened.
It was most peculiar.
By the time I got logged in again just now, I completely forgot what I had wanted to write about on Friday.
So the book I can’t tell you about on here has now made it (quite a long way) into the Amazon Top 100 Bestseller List for a third week!! SQUEE I WROTE A GODDAMN BESTSELLER, BITCHES!! (…and my in-laws and assorted relatives still think I’m an unemployed layabout loser working occasional days as a substitute teacher. And I can’t tell them otherwise. They probably wouldn’t believe me if I did. It’s like being a superhero only my secret power is NSFW).
Oh and in case you’re wondering, the money doesn’t get good until you hit the top 5, so no, I’m still poor. This person had a #1 bestseller and still didn’t make anything. And I’m sure some sanctimonious middle class person will try to say “but that’s not why you should write” because you *should* write to be poor (which is fine if you’ve never had to choose between eating or paying rent I suppose), to be unappreciated (which is fine if you believe you’re Van Gogh or something), to be ignored (see prev. re: Van Gogh), because that’s the stereotype we imagine for writers and what we tell ourselves to feel better about the fact that some people are spending 16 hours a day, 6 or 7 days a week doing something they actually want to do (yes, I actually do, come hypomania or depression, I work very hard and some days I only write 50 words but it’s 50 more than I had the day before, other days what I write makes no sense, but that’s okay because it clears my brain out, it’s like scraping the gloop out of the sink so you can wash dishes in it, instead of letting that gloop touch your crockery). Like we imagine that all the pretty people are dumb and all ugly people have hidden depths, instead of seeing that some pretty people are clever and some ugly people are very shallow. I will never stop appreciating being able to write. So I will look forward to writing being my full time income one day but obviously, the money I’ll get in several months’ time (bookstores pay s-l-o-w-l-y) is a LOT better than nothing and while it isn’t going to pay all my bills that month, it at least goes a long way towards it and therefore validates my Goddamn life choices. And I didn’t even have to take my clothes off this time.* 😛
*I am neither confirming nor denying having done this in the past although I do feel it’s high time my cat** wrote a guest post because it would make interesting reading.
**I don’t have a cat. That’s sort of the point.
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And apparently every year Amazon has some special deals that are only available to Prime subscribers. This year, that’s happening on July 12th. From today up to July 12th, Amazon has loads of special pre-prime day deals to get you in the mood (or something).
My personal opinion? Signing up for a free 30 day trial of Amazon Prime, including free shipping and loads of TV shows, makes a lot of sense if you want to do some bargainous shopping. This is a very good month to try Amazon Prime for free, just remember (if you don’t intend to keep it) to cancel before the month is up, and sit back and reap the rewards.
I had Amazon Prime for about a year but I cancelled it in favor of Netflix because they didn’t have such a good range of TV shows. I think I’d consider it again now that the Clarkson Hammond and May show (formerly Top Gear) is on there. Also did you hear about the BBC’s so-called “Top Gear” that they’ve been trying to flog as a replacement to the (not-quite-original but definitely best) Clarkson version? Chris Evans, the show’s main host, and seasoned TV presenting veteran, has just quit. They’re flogging a dead horse, and I’ve been saying since Clarkson got sacked, that nobody in their right mind would sign up to take the place of Clarkson Hammond and May, the audience for that show is too pre-prejudiced against change. They’d have been better off doing a total re-format, since Clarkson invented most of the stuff they did on there anyway. Those of you who know me in person know how much I appreciate Jeremy Clarkson’s contributions to journalism (oh God, the way he can get you from the opening sentence, I wish I could do that), he literally invented new ways to write/talk about cars, and no-one can really replace that. But you can watch Jeremy Clarkson, James May and Richard Hammond messing around in cars IN OCTOBER on Amazon Prime with the 30 day trial in the UK; the BBC was really shitty about copyrights on all the stuff Clarkson came up with while he worked for them, so Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May have renamed their new car show “Grand Tour.” I wish I was eligible for another free trial of Amazon Prime now 😦
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Also, this rainbow wig is legit gorgeous I wish I could afford it, its so beautiful, and I wanted to show you all, but WordPress doesn’t allow image links from Amazon. Last time I accidentally pasted the wrong link onto a WordPress post, WordPress actually shut this blog down within seconds, not giving me a chance to fix the problem, and I had to email them 5 or 6 times over 2 days to get them to understand that it was an honest mistake. I totally don’t get the weird and wonderful policies that various blogging sites have regarding their smallprint. I think now I have my own domain I’m allowed to do more advertising, but I look at some of the sites that have come up in reader over the past few months, wall-to-wall advertising, and I simply want to vomit in disgust. The whole marketing model is messed up if they make money from that shit. It’s like those trees falling in the woods and concussing bears who are trying to take a dump.
I upgraded my WordPress.com blog to a custom domain because I had wanted to upgrade to a custom domain since November 2014. I researched the benefits of a custom domain and the pitfalls, and everyone’s advice was clear cut – “do it, it will improve your SEO ranking.” SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is really important to me as something like 90% of my traffic comes from Google. Only now it’s taken a hit, and it’s all because I upgraded to a custom domain. Here’s what will happen to your site’s metrics when you upgrade to a custom domain:
You will lose your Alexa ranking. Low numbers are good (Google has an Alexa rank of 1): Mine went from an extremely healthy sub-6 million (and steadily increasing) to over 18 million overnight. Take a look:
BEFORE: I was in the top 6 million websites worldwide.
AFTER: My website’s ranking has dropped by 12.5 million places! WTF??
Your backlinks from your WordPress blog will all redirect – but you won’t be getting that link juice or authority for all the SEO work you’ve been busting your ass over for the past year.
So you will lose all your Google rankings. As an example, here’s a before and after picture for the search term “how to get rid of blue circles”:
BEFORE: I was the number 1 result.
AFTER: I dropped to 3rd place after getting a custom domain.
This means you will lose traffic. When you lose traffic, it’s just a negative spiral. My traffic was over 300 views a day two weeks ago, when I still had a WordPress domain; now I’m on a custom domain, I get 150 to 200 views a day.
Sites that heavily lifted content from your site to write their own imitation articles will now outrank you in search results, as will sites displaying 10 words before you have to click next, and ones which are a vehicle for Google Adsense. The blue circles example is just an example – all of my most-read posts have plummeted down the Google rankings.
Gravatar will not accept the domain change as a WordPress site, so while you redirect, as far as Alexa and Google are concerned, your new domain is dead to them. They have withdrawn help/support as well so you can’t contact them and ask them to fix it. Gravatar is owned by and integral to WordPress.
Since Gravatar is how your WordPress Login manages all your backlinks from your comments on other people’s sites (you know, when people click your name and it magically takes them to your site? That’s a dofollow backlink), you now lose any link juice from comments on sites with a better Alexa ranking than yours. I lost three of my most important backlinks from this, because there are a lot of big sites (CNN for example) that are powered by Wordpress.
People don’t really look at the URL any more. Half the kids in schools don’t actually know what to do with a URL if you give them one on a worksheet and put a laptop in front of them. Most of the people using the internet these days have this same level of understanding of computers. Therefore the main argument in favour of getting a custom domain from WordPress is redundant – they claim your site will improve in search results and get more authority but it’s just not true because they don’t let you change your backlink in Gravatar – just the website URL in contact details – and Gravatar refuses to accept the new domain as a WordPress account – no matter how many times you give them your login details. As far as Gravatar is concerned, you no longer have a blog (but WordPress knows you do, so auto-redirects from your old URL. Any redirected links are worth nothing in SEO terms).
I worked twice as hard over the last 7 days trying to get more backlinks on non-Wordpress sites (because my WordPress account’s backlinks are now utterly worthless) and while I’ve gotten four new backlinks pointing to my site from upstream (from more popular sites), I haven’t gained a single inch of ground.
The internet at large doesn’t seem to have a solution to any of the above. So I am writing this for anyone else wondering about upgrading to a custom WordPress domain – if SEO is where your traffic comes from, upgrade to a custom WordPress domain at the START of your blog, or don’t do it at all.
Post-Publication Update: After I published this post, I had a hunch. I’ve just checked, and I’m right: ALL of your internal links need manually changing to the new domain name as well, because WordPress doesn’t do this either. I was under the impression that the “technical difficulties” they said my site might have for 72 hours was because WordPress was crawling my site and changing all the links. So all my INTERNAL SEO (the links pointing to other parts of my own website) all also need changing. This is another cause of loss of Google ranking.
