Thursday, September 27, 2007

What I think about Vivid Elements and Blogware


Stop reading now Dad, because I am going to say at the end of this post how much money I pissed away on my fruitless attempts at hosting this blog at my own domain name. The only reason why I'm writing this post is so that it will be spidered and when anyone is thinking about buying services from Vivid Elements and they do a search and come up with my blog post - or the mirror page over on my Dogkisser site and they read it - maybe they'll have second thoughts and maybe Vivid Elements will lost some money because they made such a boondoggle of what I wanted.

What I wanted was to host my blog at my own domain name - you see that all the time - you click on a link and people have their blogs at whatever they've chosen as their own domain name (and they've paid money to buy that domain name). And in this wonderful 21st century - the computer wizards have set things up so that you no longer have to type in the "www" in front of websites anymore. Hence, in order to get to the website you're reading right now - all you have to type in is http://dogkisser.blogspot.com/ - and all you have to type in to get to the website that I'm hosting my liver stuff is http://dogkisser.ca/ - now THAT website is where I wanted to host my blog.

And that is where I wanted Vivid Elements to put my blog. And do you think they could do it? NO...... they said there was something about a CName thing-a-ma-jiggy and a mirror host that I had to go into my domain registry and change - and it turns out Domains at Cost didn't have that feature - so the best we could was to host the blog and always have to put in http:// - WWW - dogkisser.ca

Well I was very unhappy about that - because there would be a ton of people who would NOT be typing in the WWW and they'd get - "Website doesn't exist" - and that to me is unacceptable. So Vivid Elements said that if I switched my domain hosting over to them - then they could set the domain hosting up properly and everything would work out fine. So I paid them an additional $18 and went through a huge bunch of hassle to move my domain name dogisser.ca over to them.

And what do you think happened? You're right!! Nothing!!!!!!! They still couldn't get the fan-damned website to work without punching in the www first. So now I was really pissed.

While this level of annoyance was going on - I was also being annoyed by the Blogware software. Everything I tried wasn't working - and I'd email the administrator so that it could be turned on - because unlike most people - I read the manuals that are provided with whatever I buy - so I knew that I could do certain things, and when I tried them - it wouldn't work. So that was annoying having to email the administrator every day about software glitches IN ADDITION to to this over-riding problem of the domain name debacle.

And the software itself isn't very good - as you can tell - my blog is photo heavy - and you've got to go to one section of the program to upload the photos - 1 at a time, and then go to another part of the program to write your post - and then go back to the other section of the program to retrieve those photos so that you can insert them in your post! What a lot of work to write one post! Now that is bullshit!!

Oh, just writing this post is giving me a headache, my head is pounding just thinking about how horrible the whole experience was.

So I ask for my money back because I decided to just point my domain name back to the original web site that I had at http://dogkisser.ca/ and go back to Blogger - and do you think they'd give it to me? No. The administrator that I'm dealing with says that she "thinks everything can be solved with a phone call".

How can their incompetence be solved with a phone call? How can a completely non-functioning blog that I paid for be solved by talking person to person? I don't understand how. So this blog post is my answer to the situation. I've decided to soak the $164 for the blog and the $18 for the domain name transfer and take some heart in the fact that maybe Vivid Elements will lose more money than that through the publishing of this blog post.

Thanks to the beauty of the internet. I love the internet, don't you? Tell all your friends.

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