The Importance of Doing Your Research

So February 1, 2015, I finally went ahead and did it. I deleted my old blog, jennymiller62.wordpress.com. If you were to go looking for that blog now, you would not find it. It is gone.

I’ve been putting off that action for months–more than a year, in fact. I did not want to get rid of it. I had almost three years worth of information on it. I’d worked hard on that site. But I thought I had to do it. I thought the only way to get a blog with my married name in the url was to create a new blog and delete the old one.

I had to do it.

So Sunday afternoon I went to my site, clicked on tools and saw the DELETE SITE button glowing. Right there in open. I thought it would take forever to find. I’d looked up “how to delete site” multiple times before and forgot what they’d told me three seconds after I read it. But nope. There it was. Easy to find. Easy to use. Thank you, wordpress.

So I clicked on the–Duh, Big Red Button–DELETE SITE button. It asked me why I wanted to do it. I thought, huh, ok, no problem. I clicked, “I want to change my address,” and BOOM, there it was.

An Option to Change my URL.

I was wrong.

I’d been wrong for the past year and four months. Probably more. I didn’t have to delete my website. I didn’t have to create two new blogs and delete my old one. I could just update my old URL, keep my old blog and go on my merry way. Hurrah!

Yeah, sure. If this had been October of 2013, maybe. February of 2015, and all this work and stress later? Nope.

 I Feel Like An Idiot.

 Sigh.

So, yeah. That’s me. And you want to know the worst of it? People tried to tell me I was wrong.

(I think. I can’t  be positive. I mean, I understand Spanish better than I do well-meaning people who can’t communicate but give me funny looks when I describe this issue and then say something like, “I don’t think that’s how that works.”)

And being wrong? I can stand being wrong. I’m fine with being corrected. Writers don’t survive being a writer if they can’t learn how to handle correction and criticism.

It’s doing ALL OF THIS WORK and then discovering there was a virtual Easy Button the entire time.

GAH. I am an idiot.

 You see, boys and girls, this is why you do your research. If I’d only braced myself and done my homework a lot earlier, I could have saved myself a whole mountain range’s worth of stress. But nooooo, I had to go and be a coward . . . .

On the plus side, I’ve exported the entire contents of my blog onto my computer (another handy button that wordpress provided, THANK YOU) and just as soon as he can get around to it, my genius husband is going to write a little program that will translate it from the jumbled up code into something I can use. So I haven’t totally lost everything.

Now, if I could go back and change it, would I? Knowing what I know now? Surprisingly, no. Oh, I’d still change my url to say Gorman rather than Miller, but I still would have created another website for Scriptures for Dealing.

I think I’ll stop kicking myself now. But I want chocolate.