I’m changing my publish date to Tuesdays from Fridays effective this week!
This week, I’ll share about the big problem I had when I moved my new website (from my local server), to Hostgator, where my site resides.
I mentioned that it was taking way too long to complete my site because I couldn’t decide on features to incorporate, i.e. sliders, types of pages and a host of things. Finally, I decided to publish and perfect later on. It was a good decision and one I’d recommend to everyone. So many people are perfectionists and because of it, we don’t get our content out there.
The big problem I had was that all my images from my blog (since 2007), weren’t showing up on my new site. I mentioned that I constructed my new site from scratch on my local server software. I didn’t use anything from the old site except for importing all my blog posts. The posts looked fine on the local server with all images showing. So why did they disappear when they were moved to the new site? After talking to several people and Hostgator, I think I understand what happened.
My website was really in two places on my host server. The pages all pointed to, or came from, one set of WordPress folders. My blog pointed to, or came from, a different set of WordPress folders. How did this happen? I’m pretty sure this happened in 2012 when I called Hostgator support to get help on some problems I was having with my blog (I don’t recall exactly what it was). What I do remember is the guy saying he could fix it by doing what I mentioned above (the pointing to two sets of folders). At the time, I just wanted the site to show up correctly, so I didn’t take the time to go back an figure out the true problem. Over time, I forgot about it. I did have some strange things going on with the blog page – at the top there were some strange error messages that would go away when I refreshed the page. I thought getting my new site going would eliminate that problem, but it exposed what happened before and all my images were gone. I tried several fixes (experimenting on my local server), that didn’t work. I’ve talked to several people about it and have gotten some suggestions.
For now, I’ve chosen to restore my images myself. This way I can choose a featured image for each post. I still have all my images, neatly filed by year and month,(it’s done automatically with the WordPress software), so it’s painstaking, but do-able. I may look through my WordPress database (or a friend has volunteered to), to see if the images are in there. I could call Hostgator and insist they find and restore them too. Which would you do?
It’s been a learning experience and from it, I’ve learned to get to the bottom of these glitches and get it fixed before it affects other things. I’ve also gotten very well acquainted with the File Manager inside my Hostgator Control Panel. I’ve been able to clean/delete a lot of folders, so that’s been positive.
So maybe you’ve noticed the image with this article. This is supposed to be a drawing of me that I had done via the website Fiverr. This is a site that will do many, many things for just $5. I thought I’d do it just on a whim. I’ve had it for over a year and wasn’t sure how I liked it. So let me know what you think in the comment section! I’m going to put it on my website – at least for now!