Loving G Suite...

Well, I have to say, this old dinosaur from the stone age (aka, "Southern Muse") is loving G Suite. Oh, how I wish it had been around twenty years ago! After pointing my domain name at my site (built with G Suite tools, using New Google Sites), I was able to set up my "business" (hobby?) entity, Southern Muse, so that everything looks as I want it to look (almost; I did have to use their site template, with a big banner and title at the top). But... I really like the way the site looks. I have my display name set to "Southern Muse" which works just fine. I have various aliases set up for my one user (the user, myself, whose account costs $5 per month, going on $6 now). My aliases do what I want them to do: one email alias that I use when calling support or handling the "business" details of my site; one for replying to comments on my "business" blog and one for replying to comments on my "personal" blogs; another one for replying to anyone who should happen to view my website and like my art and want to email the artist. Everything looks great. I do have one issue with my profile--somehow, on one of them, my landline and mobile number are served up when anyone clicks on my profile picture (or maybe not; since I was logged into my admin account, it might have allowed me to view my own private information). I even checked with Google Support to make sure I'm not breaking any obscure T&C rules or ethics by presenting myself, my site, as "Southern Muse," while my profile pages clearly let everyone know who I am, on a "need-to-know" basis, if, for example, they should get an email from me or click through the site and view my profile or "About Us" section. In the little "self-check" I did to see if my email aliases are working properly, each email that came into my (one) inbox had the right look and feel: my business-owner persona had the "D" icon at the top ("D" for "Deborah"). My art persona had my pretty morning bird painting on its little profile icon. And my personal email had the little profile picture of my sister and I in the snow. The name on all of the emails is my real name, not my display name (so I'm not sure how that would work for businesses who want their sales people to use the "sales" alias). It all works well for me. I even found that I can update my old blogs, created in my personal GMail account, so that the profile pretty much matches my Southern Muse one, if I want to. I haven't done that, because I'm afraid viewers might think of it as a mirror site--so instead, I use a slightly different display name and present a little message letting them know it's really me: Southern Muse in disguise. For $6 per month, it's still half the price of my old hosting plan, and not nearly the headache to build. One more disclaimer: if I do my work on my personal computer at home, and log into my "business" Google account and later my "personal" GMail account, I do get some "cookie" issues--some error messages and account conflicts, especially if I have logged in using my mobile phone. Right now, those issues are minor, and I have been able to overcome them by using different browsers to log into my two accounts. There was (and still is) a learning curve, but in general, all is well. Though I am quite tired. So, off to bed now...

Again, the Nightmare of Switching Hosts

By now it should be second nature to me to switch hosts and edit DNS records, but as always, it was a nightmare. I suspect that Tech Support very carefully avoids the whole subject, unless one is so knowledgeable that Tech Support isn't really needed. I wandered in the dark for several days, calling Tech Support for the various entities--Network Solutions (my registrar), Yahoo Small Business (my old host), and Google New Sites (my new host). I read a multitude of articles, most of which also avoided the subject of DNS. It took awhile, but I did finally find a Google Support page that did list their IPs in the form of digits, which Network Solutions' Tech Support swore I would need. I did things in the wrong order, as often happens. That caused errors, some of which were humorous, and some of which were very sad. I changed my records in Yahoo, my site host, instead of switching the nameserver back to Network Solutions first. I changed my MX records in Yahoo before downloading my emails. For quite a few months, I was still able to access the old emails (not use it, but read and save old emails). I could use my new email. This was ideal, and I was saving some old emails I wanted to save. But something I did today deleted my entire old email access in a second. I think it was when I changed the IP number in Yahoo to point to my new site. Suddenly the old email archive was just gone, link and all. Sigh. Well, I needed to do a data-dump anyway (sour grapes).

Google's Tech Support wasn't sure what to do with some of the cNAMES and things in Yahoo's Domain Manager, and advised me to leave those be. These are the steps I took, not necessarily in the right order: built my new site using G Suites apps; verified domain ownership in Google; downloaded all needed files and images from Yahoo; moved a lot of content to my various blogs; changed MX records and selected cNAMES in Yahoo; put a redirect on my old index page; changed my nameserver back to Network Solutions; dumped many old pages from the old site's directory in Yahoo; and changed the aNAMES and MX records in Network Solutions. Possibly, I should have changed only the cNAMES in Network Solutions, and used a free redirect as a pointer for my "naked domain" (domain name without the "www"). Right now, things seem fine. I did have a few glitchy moments when my computer or phone would arbitrarily serve up my old index page, looking rather pitiful with its now-broken images and links. But I added some redirects in my old index page's meta tags (not recommended, they all said, but then they also said it's easy to do, go ahead and do it); adding a permalink as a bookmark on the main page; and deleting many old pages. Afterwards, my new site came up pretty consistently. I called a friend, and it came up for her, too. I still have to wait several days for propagation and dread the day that my Yahoo Small Business account expires, because it's possible that I put the wrong DNS pointers in there somewhere. Yahoo had told me that when the account expired, it would no longer serve up files or records for me, and I could revert back to Network Solutions. I jumped the gun on that and did it today. If all is well, my site will stay up and running no matter what. If something's wrong, I guess I can log into Network Solutions and see if I can remember what to do with aNAMES, cNAMES, and MX records....

Switching from Yahoo Small Business to New Google Sites

Yahoo's Site Hosting worked well for me for many years, and then came the change to Yahoo Small Business. Whatever Yahoo did when they switched to Aabaco caused no end of frustration. Most of the time, I couldn't even find a place to log in! Every link led to a sales page. For a long time, I couldn't find a phone number for tech support. When I finally did, it was helpful at first. Each tech would give me very specific instructions, have me bookmark a log-in page, have me sign in under my domain name instead of my old personal site name... but these fixes were oddly temporary. The bookmarks would work for a session or two, and then expire or something. And the confusion! Was it Yahoo? Was it Luminate? Was it Aabaco? They used all of these site names and locations at various times. Tech Support often gave me conflicting information. One would have me sign in under my old user name; the next one would say, "Never do that! Sign in under your domain email!" I suppose the real problem is that my site and site-building history covered a number of years. It must have seemed quaint, to Tech Support, to chat with someone who still used the site's Text Editor instead of Site Builder to build pages.

As always, switching hosts was a nightmare, but I have done it. My site is now on New Google Sites, and we'll see how long those last. Google, after all, has quite a track record for discontinuing services at the drop of a hat...