Thursday, July 21, 2005

At Least I'm Back To Where I Was In January

This morning, I finally spoke to someone competent at Network Solutions. And, I wish I had written her name down, but I didn't. I had expected to ask to speak to a supervisor, but didn't when she seemed to be able to understand my problem.

But first, the background.

Background

This little blog started in December 2004 with the URL http://basils.blogspot.com/ which served its purpose. That site still exists, but redirects you to this one.

Anyway, I decided I wanted a "presence" in the form of my own domain name. So I registered basilsblog.net with Network Solutions. And, I had it redirect to my old blog. That means, if you typed "http://www.basilsblog.com" in the address bar of your browser, it would resolve to http://basils.blogspot.com/ and everything would be fine.

But, that meant that "basilsblog.net" was nothing but an alias for basils.blogspot.com, and that basils.blogspot.com is the "real" site. I wanted my own presence (basilsblog.net) to be real. So, I moved to TypePad in January. They support domain mapping, which means if you type http://www.basilsblog.net/ in the address bar, it comes up that way. And that's what I wanted.

But there's a catch.

Problems, Problems

From the TypePad Help Documentation:

How do I set up my domain to work without typing the www?The mapping sets up your http://www.example.com address. To enable the http://example.com address (without the www) to work with your site, you would use a redirect from http://example.com to http://www.example.com. How this is set exactly depends on your registrar.
What that means is, some folks don't type in the "www" when they type in a URL. And some people (NZ Bear) add you to their Ecosystem without the "www" on the site address. And when they do that, they can't get to this little blog.

TypePad doesn't support dropping of the "www" and they put it on the registrar to handle that. That's where Network Solutions enters the picture. They are the registrar.

Note to anyone who drops the "www": Don't.

Anyway, because people do that, I contacted Network Solutions about resolving it.

Customer Disservice

The first on-line request where I told what I wanted to do was answered with instructions for me to ... do what I had already done!

So I called. And I'm guessing that every time I called, it was "Take Your Kid To Work Day" because they didn't know how to do what I wanted done.

I called again and explained it again. I was told "give it 24 hours." To no avail.

Finally, yesterday at lunch, before I had to handle a water issue (another long, boring story), I spoke to someone who indicated they could help. The result was the entire site went down.

I called about it late last night, after I got back on-line at home (another long, boring story) and the lady said she'd take care of it. As of this morning, no changes were made to my account settings.

So I called again and asked for a supervisor. They apparently don't have any. At least not early in the morning. Unless that was the president of the company I was speaking to. But I don't think so.

Back Up And Running

When I called later this morning, I was prepared to ask for a supervisor. But the kind lady said she knew how to get me back up within a couple of hours. This was much better than the "wait 24 hours line I normally get fed by them."

So, I gave her the go-ahead. While I was still on the phone with her, the site came back up. E-mail, too. Which had been down since last night. Oh, did I mention that I use Network Solutions e-mail for my account on this little blog? Well, I do. And it went down when the blog did.

Only, the blog didn't go down. The TypePad URL (http://basil.blogs.com/) was working. Oh, don't go using that URL, now. I'm just letting you know so you'll understand that TypePad was working just fine. It was Network Solutions that had me down.

All I Ask Is ...

Here's all I want to do:
  1. When you type (or click on) http://www.basilsblog.net/ you get this little blog.
  2. When you click on a particular post or page, such as Headline News, that you see that it's page http://www.basilsblog.net/headline_news/index.html in the address bar.
  3. When you type (or click on) http://www.basilsblog.net/ you get this little blog.
Now, is that too much to ask? I didn't think so.

The kind lady I spoke to this morning got me back up and running, as I said. So, numbers 1 and 2 are happening. But still not number 3.

So, I'm now back to where I was in January. And not happy about it.

5 comments:

  1. I set up the domain mapping to www for me, and I set up forwarding at Go Daddy so that thepiratescove.us would be forwarded to www.thepiratescove.us. I'll say one thing for Go Daddy, they have really great CS, except for one shathead.

    ReplyDelete
  2. If you email me your NS login and password I can go in and set it (#3) up for you.

    ReplyDelete
  3. J at TAotB:
    Thanks. Do consider using the posts such as the Breakfast, Lunch, or Supper posts for listing your posts.

    William Teach:
    I've previously been happy with NetSol. Today, no so. A change might be in order.

    Hans Mast:
    E-mail me your phone number and I'll call you and you can walk me through it.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Grrr. I'm no fan of NetSol. I used to like Register.com, they had a nice user interface to take care of such things. Now I use ICDSoft (for hosting and handling the domain) and their customer service (via email) is incedible. I get an answer within 5 minutes, 24 hours a day. However, I don't know a whole lot about the company and need to back up my little blog for the day when they are bought up or out of business. If that were to happen today, all I've done would be completely lost.

    Glad to have you back online...

    ReplyDelete
  5. I used to use Register.com, but they did something and made me angry. Don't remember what. Anyway, I moved to NetSol. All 12 domains I own.

    I'll look into ICDSoft, since a change might be in order.

    And thanks.

    ReplyDelete

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