Homestead Blog Hop 381 and The Importance of Real People

Welcome to the Homestead Blog Hop!

The importance of a person!

People are important.

Ordinary, regular people just doing their jobs are super needed. I don’t care if that was a proper sentence construction. It’s true.

One person today named William turned things around for me, and I have never met him, nor will I ever.

Automation sometimes stinks.

Yep

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It’s true.

Those automatic updates that tout such awesomeness sometimes just ain’t all they’re cracked up to be!

Yesterday my website updated. Automatically. That would be without me knowing.

All seemed well until I tried to save a blog post, then my site basically stuck its tongue out at me and said no.

I had no idea what was happening until I tried to log on and found the white screen of death, as they call it, and another page with a critical error message.

Now that did not bode well.

I stayed up for awhile last night, lost in jargon of coding, instructions, tutorials, and helpful hints, but basically lost in website world. Truth is, I’m no coder. There are plenty of skills I want to learn, but coding is worse than chemistry, and I suffered through that enough in high school. Nope. Coding is not my language.

This morning I spent hours wading through more instructions, but the thing is, when you don’t know what you’re doing, you don’t know what you’re doing. Super smart website geeks can explain it til the cows come home, and I’m still gonna be lost!

I did put forth some effort. Copied and pasted some code snippets (which still may blow up on me) but seriously lamented the fact that with pages of helpful tutorials out there, it is amazing in a bad way that you just cannot find a real person to tell you what to do!

For me, when I’m in trouble, I don’t need books and pages, I need a person!

I literally spent hours. Hours. I’m too ashamed to tell you how many, but I was just lost. Clicking here and here for any shred of actual instruction in my plain old English tongue.

I would have packed it all up and headed to the local computer store, but the last time it took them five days to get back with me, and they ewarned me that it was “gonna cost me”. Ok. I get it. So I passed on that one.

Isn’t it amazing that WordPress.org hosts millions of blogs and websites, but you cannot find a human being anywhere to help you? No live chats, no email support, just a bunch of forums that may or may not even address your specific problem. So they waste time is my time to cut out some humans. Thanks a bunch.

My website hosting was the same. In the past I know I remember real people, and nice ones. No more. All kinds of instructions to try, but when they don’t work, you’re back to staring at your stupid screen with the critical message. If that doesn’t make you feel stressed, then you haven’t worked in the medical field. Critical means bad.

Finally, at noon, I got an option for a live chat.

What do you know? That almost sounded human!

That’s where William came in! Within just a few minutes, he had clicked this and changed that, and I was in. Problem is, now I get to redesign my webpage all over again, because one update conflicted with another update, and he had to delete something in order to make the critical thing revive. Ugh. Not on my to do list today.

So…if you came for the blog hop, that’s why it is six or more hours late.

If you came back, thank you!

And that is also why my blog is bare bones and minimalist. I’m working on making it pretty again!

And let’s all say a big thank you to William, at Dreamhost, whom we all will never meet, for at least being a real life hero just by doing his job and not rushing me away for another lost blogger.

And his advice: turn off those automatic WordPress updates until they’ve proven their ability to not mess up everything. I’m smart enough to listen, William.

*Addendum: even after all of that, I faced troubles. Remember when I said I’d added a little bit of code?! Yeah–that came back to bite me.

You never get the same person when you return to the live chat, but I did learn that those guys were the experts, so I went back. This time, I got Andy–and he was as helpful as William. He deleted the code from the file I had messed with, and refrained from making me feel like an idiot, so that’s a plus. Kudos to those tech guys over at Dreamhost!

Now on to the Hop

Homestead Blog Hop will take place every Wednesday and is for all things homesteading: real food recipes, farm animals, crafts, DIY, how-to’s, gardening, anything from-scratch, natural home/health, self-sufficiency, self-reliance, natural remedies, essential oils, & more! Basically anything related to homesteading.

Meet Your Hosts!

Follow Their Blogs

Kelly – Simple Life Mom (Facebook | Pinterest | Twitter | G+ | Instagram)

Natasha – Houseful of Nicholes (Facebook | Pinterest | Twitter | Instagram)

Liz – The Cape Coop (Facebook | Pinterest | Twitter | Instagram)

Ann – Live the Old Way (Facebook | Pinterest | Twitter | Instagram)

Laurie – Ridge Haven Homestead (Facebook | Pinterest | Instagram)

FEATURED POSTS

from the Last Homestead Blog Hop

Each week we take turns choosing three posts to feature. Each post will be shared on all social media platforms by all of the hosts! Here are the features from Last Week’s Hop:

1. Pepperoni Pizza Bombs from Flour on My Face

2. How to Make Beeswax Candles from Artful Homemaking

3. Seed Starting 101 from Its My Sustainable Life

Congrats! Feel free to grab the featured on button for your post.

Just right click and ‘save image as…’

Guidelines for this Get-Together:

1. Click on the “Add your Link” Button below and add a great image of your project or recipe. Make sure you link to the page of your family friendly post – not the main page of your blog.
2. Link up to three posts each week.
3. Try to visit at least a few other blogs at the party. Be sure to leave a comment to let them know you stopped by.
4. Link your post back to the Homestead Blog Hop. If the hop isn’t linked to your post then you cannot be featured. All featured posts will be shared on all hosts’ social media channels.
5. Please link up posts that you haven’t linked to the hop before. You are welcome to link old posts from your blog.
6. By joining the party, you are giving the hosts permission to use one photo from your post with a link back to your site if it is selected as one of next week’s Features.
7. This is a family-friendly link up meant to inspire and motivate the homesteader in all of us.

Let the Party Begin

Join Our Pinterest Board

Follow us on Pinterest and send me a message that you’d like to be added to our Homestead Blog Hop group board. The only rule is to only add posts that you’ve also added here.

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