Hello Reader,
My website was offline for three weeks. I left SmugMug and I'm now on WordPress. In January, I wrote most of the content for the new website and uploaded photos. The website also got a new design. It was a lot of work. And I'm still not finished. The hardest part is writing content for the website. Especially for photos. I often don't know what to write. Unfortunately, search engines demand text for photos. Otherwise, they won't get listed. It is a time-consuming and annoying challenge. Now imagine writing texts for 500 photos. Do you get the picture?
The reason why my website was offline for so long was that I tried to mask the domain’s hostname. This masking almost drove me crazy. When you change your DNS, it takes 24 to 72 hours to propagate around the world. During that time, your domain name is offline and you can't do anything. All you can do is twiddle your thumbs and wait. And if that propagation somehow doesn't work, you lose all that time. And you can start over. My domain name was at a different registrar and not the same as my WordPress host. That is why I wanted to use masking. Masking is hiding the host's domain name and showing my domain name in the address bar. Alas, that didn't work. And I lost so much time trying to figure out what went wrong.
In the end, I transferred my domain name from my old registrar to the new registrar. The good news is that my host is also a registrar. The host and the registrar are not the same. Whereas the host provides webspace, the registrar provides a domain name.
This transfer took one week. After that, I had to change the domain name of the host to my domain name. Which took another day.
The customer support of my registrar and host is excellent. Communicating back and forth went as smooth as glass.
My website is now running on WordPress and is accessible at my domain name, ArsSilentium.com. At last, everything works fine.
Stay creative,
Ars