a(nother) new blog

I've lost count of how many 'first posts' I've written over the years, and whether they were for online blogs or my personal journals, they've always been awkward to write. 

This blog has been started as a carry-over from my previous Cinder Says website, but just starting all over again. I've made the move from Wordpress thanks to a pretty ugly situation. In short, I hadn't been using my website for a long time so decided to let my upgraded Wordpress plan expire, taking me back to the free version. In doing so, I lost the ability to have it connected to my cindersays.com domain name (which, thankfully, I own independently of Wordpress). I don't understand the ins and outs of it, but essentially once my premium plan expired and my domain name was removed, somehow it all got pointed to hardcore porn websites. My domain provider was great, and spent awhile trying to sort it out for me, but said it was on Wordpress's end and there was nothing he could do. 

So off to Wordpress we go. I do the chat thing, which is AI powered, and I'm impressed when it understands very quickly what the issue is. I'm much less impressed when I'm told that in order to have this "very serious security issue" corrected, I would need to renew my premium plan to access the required security functionality. Yep - I was expected to pay to make Wordpress stop pointing my DNS server to porn. I politely told the AI that this wasn't an acceptable resolution, and that I shouldn't have to pay to fix Wordpress's error, and was politely told too bad so sad. But, given it was a security issue, I should type 'connect me to a human' so they could provide guidance, even though I was on the free plan. So I asked for a human... and got told I couldn't have a human unless I paid for them. 

The whole thing left a really awful taste in my mouth. Thank goodness I have Thor, who was able to help me sort out the nuclear option and delete it all. It just makes me feel so bad for those who don't have a Thor or don't have the understanding/knowledge... taking advantage of people in those situations is just gross. So, no more Wordpress for me.

To be fair, the fresh start is nice. In typical fashion it's just about to ding over to a New Year so I'm in good company with others who are starting the New Year's resolution blogs. 

For me, this blog is (ideally) going to focus more on reading and books, in an attempt to get into a regular writing habit again. I've got some big reading goals for 2025! And with my recent house move, have uncovered a whole bunch of my early writings, which I might just share for the exceptional cringe they will offer :D 

Anyways, welcome to my new/old blog! Thanks for being here. :)