… what else did I do yesterday? Wound up yarn for dyeing. Fired the kiln. It’s not quite cool enough to open yet, as I didn’t get it started until after noon. It needs a couple hours more for cooling off. I’m meeting friends for lunch and hopefully it’ll be ready to open by the time I get back. This firing was almost 100% … no, I think it was 100% custom work.

I also worked on the back end of the blog a little bit, playing with posts and the new layout. This theme isn’t very wide, due to the two sidebars, so all of my “Treasury Tuesday” posts are wonky now. And of course I have them pre-blogged through April, because (and not to toot my own horn) but I’m in a lot of treasuries. So I cleaned them all up, deleted the ones where the item had sold and I doubt my ability to replace it any time soon, and changed the format a bit. That got me down to the beginning of February. My idea is to catch up to myself, and then make the posts about the treasuries I’ve been in during the last week.

Speaking of Etsy, I may be growing out of it somewhat. Well, that makes me sound too big. I’m getting constrained, put it that way. Like when Alice put on the gloves in Rabbit’s house and grew to be the size of the house, only still trapped inside. I’ve got one foot in the chimney and my head is pressing against the rafters. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this, not just yesterday, although it was on my mind since I was watching that lace dry.

Good things about Etsy
- I don’t have to worry about shop format
- I get a lot of free advertising by being in treasuries
- it integrates relatively easily with Facebook and Twitter, for shout-outs
- a larger customer base than I might have on my own, simply due to people doing key-word searches
- while it does get more expensive the more you list and sell simply due to per-item/transaction fees, the money I’m spending on that is equal to or less than what I’d spend on my own site (not including the advertising I’d then have to do)

Things that would make me look elsewhere for a shop
- only ten categories allowed. Where do I put my lip balm? Hand lotion? Lace yarn?
- category names can only be 24 characters long. How random is that? And frustrating, too, if you want to make it look like “Ceramics: Mugs and Soap Dishes” because that’s 31 characters. Also they don’t allow a colon to be used in shop names, so… it winds up looking like “Ceramic/ Mugs,SoapDishes” and that just makes me twitch every time I see it.
- payments. You can use PayPal, or other; I want to leave the “other” option open for things like cash sales locally, or gift certificates. But there’s no way to tell people what “other” is for other than in your shop policies, which nobody reads, and I’ve wound up sending a lot of people PayPal invoices because they choose “other” thinking they can pay with a credit card, or with a check. Half the time when that happens, I wind up losing the sale because the person just gives up and never gets back to me. If I were on my own site, I should be able to still offer PayPal, but offer “in store pickup” or “cash” as well.
- shipping. Shipping KILLS me with the stupid. Etsy charges by item, not by weight. So I have to … guess. I’ve pretty much got the single-item price down by now, but it’s the multiples that kill me. Either I wind up eating a lot of shipping, or I wind up refunding, and I’d really like it if it just… did it by weight. I mean, there is a sweet spot where the weight of what someone is buying (when buying multiples) works out to the per-item price; but more oft than not it doesn’t. And that just bothers me, possibly because I know there’s an easier way – charge by weight per zone! Which I could do if I had my own shopping cart program. Gah.

I’m thinking that ultimately, I’ll have a little bit on Etsy (my most popular items, holiday items, etc) and a little bit on Wild Iris (stuff I sell through them, exclusive-to-them items) but then I’ll have the bulk of what I do on my own HaldeCraft shop site. I’ve already bought the domain name (did that when I started HaldeCraft, just so nobody else snatched it up) but I haven’t done anything with it. That might turn into a 2012 business plan.

OK… enough rambling here! I need to go get some yarn dyed before meeting friends for lunch. Friends who would probably appreciate it if I showered! Wacky.

A little over a year ago, I started getting notices that my hosting service was phasing out standard hosting and going with cloud hosting. In order to change everything over you had to…
- sign up for cloud hosting
- download everything from standard hosting
- upload it to cloud hosting
- cancel your standard hosting blog

What they don’t tell you is Step Five, which is Hope for the Fucking Best, because I have some sort of mental block about being able to do those kinds of things myself. I want to be the kind of girl who knows her way around tech things but there is something about written tutorials that just makes my brain cower with the same fear I have of word problems in math. I can follow along for so long but the very minute that something goes wrong… AND IT DOES… I start flailing around like a blind epileptic and you’d better hope I don’t hit the “DELETE THE INTERNET” button because the chances are great that I will.

Oh, hey! Apparently I mentioned this was going to happen, and then someone took pity on me and helped me, and then I thought we were done.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

I started to suspect that there might be a stage Frank left out. The big clue was that when I went to update WordPress the next time, the database link and password for the cloud hosting didn’t work… but the ones for the standard hosting did. And I sort of knew. I knew it would be a drama, that I would mess it up and get completely fussed, and that the people at my hosting company wouldn’t do much more than send me links to all the online tutorials they had. Tutorials that I had already found online and tried to use but couldn’t because the password to the cloud hosting wouldn’t work. And it was summer, and I was busy, and who the fuck wanted to deal with it? NOT ME.

Well, they kept sending threatening emails that THE END OF STANDARD HOSTING IS EXTREMELY FUCKING NIGH and finally I decided it had best be taken care of, so I didn’t lose the last year of posts. I mean, I downloaded backups of WordPress so I could always upload them into a new version of WordPress, but… BLARGH.

Aaaaaaaaaaaand, it went about as well as I thought it would.

ME: I need help doing this thing. I can do so much but then I’m gonna really fuck it up, and it would save both of us a lot of time and frustration if you could just fix it for me.
THEM: Here’s your link!
ME: Yeah. I tried that. Here’s the deal – I couldn’t get it to work. I need help doing this thing. I can do so much but then I’m gonna really fuck it up, and it would save both of us a lot of time and frustration if you could just fix it for me.
THEM: Here’s your link!
ME: PLEASE HELP ME!
THEM: HERE’S YOUR LINK!

So that went well.

It ended up that I bitched about it on G+, and my friend Craig – who was not only home sick but had a sick child at home as well – wound up giving me two hours of better over-the-phone technical support than I’ve ever gotten. I wish I could box him up and give him out to anyone who has ever been made to feel stupid by tech support, because he was AWESOME. Like a hundred billion hot dogs. And while we hit a snag and he couldn’t fix what was happening, he gave me the right words to say to the tech support to get them to make website go.

ME: Hi, I emailed earlier and wasn’t able to do things, and you didn’t help me. So my friend who is HOME SICK helped me better. But we couldn’t fix this. Here’s the list of things we did, what we fixed, and what is still broken. Please fix what needs fixing and then test the settings.
THEM: Here’s your link!
ME: Maybe you didn’t hear me. We did that, it didn’t work, just make it fucking right, how hard is it to do your job?
THEM: Fine. Here’s your fucking website. We’re not testing the settings, shut up and leave us alone.
ME: BRAIN! EXPLODING!

OK, they weren’t that rude, but they were pretty dismissive and not at all concerned that someone else was doing their job.

So of course I FLIPPED THE FUCK OUT this morning when I logged on and couldn’t get to anything other than a “yeah, this is not the database you are trying to find; move along, move along” message this morning. I hoped something was right because I was still getting email… but nothing for the website. Not even a flatline. Just a … an empty wilderness of error.

Which Craig fixed in, like, two minutes.

ALL HAIL CRAIG. I wonder if he would let me pay him $8/month to be hosted out of his brain. Also, I hear he likes chocolate chip cookies and Bay Rum soap, so guess who’s getting a thank-you gift next week?!?!?

So.

< tap > < tap >

Is this thing on…? Delurk! Tell me you can hear me, Ground Control to Major Tom! Tell me a joke, or tell me just the punch line of a joke…

Hopefully as the DNS settings repopulate throughout the magical series of tubes that is the Internets, things around here won’t look too different!

Yeah.

Well.

I may be starting the blog all over again, AGAIN. I hate having to troll through my own blog to save the good posts – why can’t migrating databases be fucking easy? Fuckity.

Also I am sick. And cranky. And about to go to the airport to pick up my aunt and uncle, after which I will beg off the Vets for Peace concert to come home and be… sick and cranky. Want to come over? I’ll sneeze on you!

I don’t know whether to be relieved, or insulted. Of course, I have totally changed hosts and software since then, and everything pre-2009 has been lost… so… I guess I’ll suffer through the pain.

I am, however, #1 in the search term “do zombies poop”. CAN I GET A HELLS YEAH?! Oh yeah, baby.

It’s in the sidebar! To the right! Yay, I *can* insert it into posts after all!

It has skulls! It has features! Like multiple choice! And entering your own answer! And grapes! Go vote!

Good morning!

I wasn’t expecting you quite so soon… please grab a cup of coffee, make yourself at home. I’ll just be making myself presentable…!

Thanks!