Run for the Hills

I am going to run for the hills on my next encounter with "Freemium". Free+Premium. That's free then not, or good+bad, which happens to be neither and leaves you in turmoil. I know how to leverage good and crawl back from bad. But the promise of good with the chaos of bad is the stuff of my nightmares.

That's precisely what happened when I recently clicked on "Upgrade to New Blog" in wix, the site where this blog is hosted. It's been asking me to upgrade for months. They will deprecate support for the old blog and it was time to move on to the promise of "good".

Instead, "bad" rained and hell broke loose.

Wix copied all of my old posts to the new blog, praise the Lord for that! It missed transferring most of the photos and it left some subscribers on the old blog and moved the rest to the new one. It made me think both blogs were active and allowed me to post in the old one and randomly pointed users to the old or new blog. Ugh!

I feel particularly bad for my friend "R" who subscribed the very day wix acted up!

I got a slew of emails from my regular readers about being unable to read my posts. At first, I thought user error and then my brother wrote. He is a doctor and an elite member of the savvy technologist group. User error is not what he does. He irritates me with how much he knows.

After his message, I decided to tame the blog beast.

I started at 10pm and it was 2am when I got everything working right after refining the upgrade, losing my domain, reconnecting the domain, changing nameservers, losing privacy protection, gaining social media exposure, resetting privacy and social settings. In the process I was forced to transition from the free version to the premium version of the site.

In hindsight, it's always best to spend money and get the premium thingy right away or don't do it at all. You get used to the free version and then the app creators have you by the throat. You can neither leave nor continue to exist. I should have expected extortion.

I am glad that regular readers are back with me now.

I love writing for you. I am delighted when you read and send me an email or text with your feedback. I am sorry I don't turn on comments or make the blog public. I prefer to get through life without knowing I offended you or being hacked by a Russian.

Please continue reading as long as you like. Drop off when it gets boring. Thank you for the time you spend with me.

For your sanity and mine, I promise to run outta dodge the next time I see Freemium and I will take my brother, the purple devil, along for safekeeping.