Are they actually waiting for my crummy $96 a year, to upgrade my site that no one visits? No offense to the ten people a month who do visit, mostly looking for French Spring Soup when I'm trying to be a serious returned prodigal Catholic; but I did have my "cart" all ready for checkout -- maybe a year ago -- when I read some professional blogger's advice that if you get fewer than 10,000 visitors to your blog annually, it's not worth paying a dime for anything.
So I never checked out. All along WordPress has warned me in a sidebar, Your cart is awaiting payment. Now I go to attend to a draft, which wasn't much good anyway, and I find that although the blog is still up, I can do nothing with it. No editing, no new draft, I can't even "add a new site." (It was going to be Pluot 2.) Every attempt sends me to a blank page, which just seems to say, "Yeah, wow, no. We need your money."
I understand the concept of paying for a service, especially one as complicated as a website hosting platform. However, my little free hobby blog is exactly the same as any other little free hobby blog, whose hosting WordPress claims will be free forever, and which has earned precisely zero dollars in "ads" for anyone, ever. All I did was set up a "cart" and then change my mind. Even hitting the trash button for the cart, now, seems to have helped not at all. You can either follow through and pay your money, or you can ignore it -- and perhaps run out of your allotted 3 GB of memory as well. Who knew?
So does that mean Blogger has memory limitations too? And, what does it mean to "self-host" WordPress? Why does there seem no mercy for those of us who grew up green with envy over Jane Austen or George Eliot, who simply handed an ink-spattered manuscript to a father or a husband, who carried it to the publisher who looked and smiled at the first page and said "Yes, this will do"?
Astonishing. So I suppose I and my ten readers and my "Potage Printanier" will have to return to the host from whence we all decamped because we thought Blogger was going the way of the dinosaurs. But how will the ten from the WordPress site know to come here, when I can't even tell them that?
