Last updated on June 16th, 2018 at 09:34 am
This is the first post I’m writing on the new server. All previous posts were written offline on my netbook’s localhost using XAMPP. You maybe have noticed that there’s still the old version of Selene’s Shadow Realm out there which is hosted on Jimdo. I will keep the old version online for archiving purposes hoping it will not be deleted by Jimdo again. Yes, you have read correctly. My site was nuked without any forewarning. The only thing left was an error message stating that the website couldn’t be loaded. I tried everything to reach the support. It took them about one month to make an official reply. Some contents of my website violated their terms. Yeah, good to know. But it would be a lot more helpful if they tell me what kind of content triggered their alarm, so that I won’t repeat these mistakes in my future posts. They probably have no time for this and prefer pushing the red delete button.
So what to do when getting still no reply – and I wrote a lot messages to the support – I asked myself a few days after the incident. I made a backup plan: rebuilding the site and not using any website builders anymore. My “new” tool of choice was WordPress. I used it for the German version of my site in 2014 before. Why didn’t I use it for the English version in the first place? Well, I just wanted to try something new and I heard mostly good things about Jimdo. You can build websites with their builder very fast (I needed considerably more time creating the new version of the site with WordPress). However, you only have very limited possibilities for design and customization as a “Jimdofree” user. I missed the wide range of WordPress plugins and themes. Simply put, you can say it like this: I went back to the roots.
My trouble with Jimdo had some good side effects after all. I improved my (little) knowledge in HTML, PHP and CSS during the rebuilding process. I also learned that you sometimes need to be persistent in order to get heard. It’s quite likely that one of my several messages to the Jimdo support finally reached the right person who solved my problem and restored my old site.
To cut a long story short, I chose a paid hosting service for my new English homepage. Using free hosting services for many years, I truly know their limitations. I hope that the paid ones are more reliable than … the hoster I’m talking about the whole time //End of rant).
Thank you for taking the time to read this post. And welcome to the new Selene’s Shadow Realm
Edit (June 16, 2018):
I recently found out that a technical problem with my Jimdo site was the reason why it wasn’t accessible for about one month. If I would have known this a lot earlier I probably wouldn’t have moved my website to another server (or I would have done the server move a lot later). Nevertheless, this whole odyssee had some good side effects; quoting myself from The Assimilation Lab forums:
[…] It was a odyssey for me but I learned a lot from it. I learned that you can get a better hearing from somebody when you keep trying and it’s good to have a backup plan. This backup plan (working on a new version of the site) improved my knowledge in WordPress, HTML, CSS and PHP. Now I have website which looks just how I wanted it to look. I took me a lot a more to time to customize it but I think it was worth it.
