My Canceled WordPress.com Blog Misadventure

It all started when Blogger's Feedburner "Follow by Email" was scheduled to be shut down. I needed a new email subscriber service, so I decided to move to WordPress.com, with their Premium $96 a year plan. Boy, was that a mistake!

I had been at Blogger with my Green Goddess Glamping camping blog for three years. I've had this Tom Kepler Writing blog at Blogger for over ten years. The composing process is pretty easy, what used to be called a WYSIWYG site, a "wizzy-wig" or What You See Is What You Get set-up. Pretty easy to use. The WordPress Premium level platform did have some more options, along with a learning curve--but I felt all was within my capacity.

Then I imported my three years of blog posts from Blogger and discovered that everywhere that I had used an single quote or double quote, the text came out including a backslash, such as can/'t instead of can't, or /"Follow by Email/" instead of "Follow by Email." I like the WordPress online chat service for problems, but didn't like the news I received. When I reported that I had written over 250 articles in three years and all the articles included this problem--and also page titles--I was told the Premium plan could not help me--I could go to the $300 a year plan, though! The "Happiness Engineer" chat comments are below.

By manually removing them, WordPress will display the titles, content, etc without the backslash character. I don't think there is an automatic way of doing this on the Premium plan but let me double-check for a moment.

Another idea that will work is creating a local version of your site, using search/replace plugin on the local site to clean up the unnecessary characters, then import or do a search and replace on that setup, export that site and import it here.

I have to admit that after researching online and finding out that this issue has been around for over ten years and that WordPress.com hasn't found a fix for this for the $96 per year plan (or the free, entry-level plan, for that matter), that pretty much tripped my trigger. 

I researched my original problem of finding a new "follow by email" service and found that Mailchimp has a great platform for free (with under 500 subscribers). I activated that service for this blog and then decided to move back to Blogger with my Green Goddess Glamping blog. 

In all fairness, I imagine the $300 a year option for WordPress.com is wonderful. For my little one-person blogs, though, I don't want to pay that amount for each, not when there is another way to go. WordPress.com is probably a good way to go if you're starting a blog out from scratch. Importing, though? Beware!

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