You Get What You Pay For

This post was originally posted on 29 January 2022 but had to be reposted due to a required update ruining my site.
I had to uninstall the required update and repost the blog. Hence, the new date.
So, WordPress.ORG or COM — both a bag of shit.

As loyal readers will know, this blog recently moved from WordPress.com to WordPress.org. Now, before I go into my rant, I’d like to point out that I am relatively happy with the move, and it did save me hundreds of £££, which was the point.

But, as the saying (and this blog title) goes, you get what you pay for.

It seems ironic that I made the more drastic move from Blogger to WordPress.com because FeedBurner—for my convenience—suddenly stopped supporting subscriber lists. With no alternative being offered, I made the move to WordPress.com, which had a widget for that purpose, losing, I suspect, a load of subscribers along the way.

And then, less than a year later, I moved to WordPress.org, which offers absolutely no method of gathering subscribers that does not include massive amounts of spam, or incurs a not insubstantial cost. And so, I made a bodge. And now I have made another.

The reason is, the form I used to gather subscribers—along with the contact forms on this and my other blogs—gained a great deal of attention from people like Irma, or Candi, or Cynthia, all excited about sharing their intimate photos with me, ones they claim I asked for, which had the double disadvantage of making my wife suspicious and not being true (there really were no pictures…someone told me that, yeah, that’s what happened). They also had the added advantage of opening my sites up to various unsolicited offers of SEO services, product promotions and gambling opportunities.

Consequently, I ended up spending a great deal of time going from site to site, sifting through the chaff looking for genuine contacts.

There are, of course, ways of automatically dealing with spam, and of collecting subscribers, but they all cost money.

Now, I am not averse to paying for things. I am, however, averse to paying over the odds for things (like WordPress.com) and paying for things again, and again, and again. All of the spam-filters, form-creators or subscription solutions offered required me to sign up for a service and pay a monthly fee. Those add up, and they never go away. They’re like offspring who just keep asking for more pocket money and refuse to move out of the basement and get a proper job.

Twice I installed widgets that promised to do what I wanted, but both times I was lied to, and once I activated the internal form creator, which didn’t work. When I contacted the help desk, I was informed that, “No, those forms don’t actually work with the WordPress pages. To integrate them, you need to download…install…IPCX Key…Java…” Whatever. It sounded like work, so I ignored it

All this, of course, led me to the lowest of the low-tech solutions. Just send me a simple email. I’ll put you on the subscription list. There’s nothing flashy or automatic about it, but it doesn’t put a dent in my bank account (on a monthly basis) and it works. Sometimes, the simple solutions are best.

Be aware that, in researching this post, I accidentally discovered my old FeedBurner contacts list, so some of you getting a notification for this blog may be surprised. I hope, not unpleasantly. But, if you are (unpleasantly surprised, that is) feel free to unsubscribe by replying to the email with “Unsubscribe” in the subject line or the text.

Thanks.

And I’m playing the bagpipes at a Burn’s Night dinner this evening, so I’m sure I’ll have something more interesting to write about in the near future.