GOING SOLO
Photo: Alone, but not lonely
Life is long, there are lots of changes, big and small. This time it's a very small change in my life, but I hope it will remove some irritation that I've built up during the past months.
iPublish has been my blog provider the past year, but I've decided it's time to change. I'm going solo. I've bought my own little space on the web, no blog provider limiting my possibilities.
The limitations that I've experienced while using iPublish, specially since they changed to WordPress MU is the reason why I've decided to leave iPublish. I don't like the blog themes available, nor the support I've received when trying to contact iPublish Support.
The blog is WordPress based, using a slightly modified version of the Mystique theme.
I've very happy with the look so far and this is most likely how the blog will look for quite some time, hope you like it!
Photo by: Έλενα Λαγαρία (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
iPublish goes WordPress MU
I started out with this blog using iPublish's own blogging platform and I've been using it for over a year now. During this year iPublish has grown very fast, and they've had serious issues handling their popularity, something that has resulted in unstable servers and sometimes lack of service.
About one and a half month ago iPublish changed their blogging platform from their homemade platform to the more stable and reliable WordPress MU, something they definitely needed.
Loosing my head!
Unfortunately, the switch was premature. Somehow iPublish has managed to skip the header images of each post. When asking Support about the matter I was told, that this error unfortunately had happened in some cases (the entirety of my 100 cases) and the best they could do was for me to log into the old control panel and download the images manually and paste them into the posts again.
Well, tough luck I though, I'll have to do the transfer manually. When trying to access the old control panel I realized it is no longer available!
This domain (login.ipublish.no) is no longer registered with a customer. What!?
Reading between the lines?
The second thing that has caused problems to the transfer to WordPress MU goes all the way back to spring 2009 when iPublish had a control panel upgrade and removed their Introduction field in the "Add post" section. Two fields, the excerpt and the main text window were reduced to a single one.
This change had no significant change to the blogs as seen from the outside world, but what annoyed me then (and even more now) is that iPublish didn't merge the text in the two fields (in their database), making text written in the Introduction field unavailable to the author.
At the time I pointed out the weakness, but no action was taken from iPublish' side. The issue got a lot bigger when I realized that iPublish didn't transfer the Introduction field when transferring to WordPress MU.
Now I have several posts with a title, but no text!
I cannot express how insanely idiotic this is, specially since iPublish never gave the user the possibility to backup their posts!
I have contacted iPublish Support about these issues, but have yet to receive an answer solving the problem ...