A few weeks ago, I received an email from my hosting service saying that WordPress was available for free installation and I could have a blog of my very own (and being just a tiny bit controlling – I liked the thought of being able to moderate everything about it, including the look). When I first went onto my site admin to try it out, it said I needed to install CGI first, so I enlisted the help of my friend Miguel (see his blog link on my blogroll). When we got together, he helped me create a SQL database (nothing in it, just a placeholder for WordPress to use) and then we tried to install WordPress, creating blog name, user and password and all that, but at the point of install, we got a database initialization error. We tried again, but were unable to figure it out.
I called the helpdesk (yes, my hosting site is nice enough to have live people you can talk to), but the person on the phone, nice but not very well informed, had to escalate my issue to Tier 2 (their more “technical” people). Tier 2 so-and-so emailed me later unapologetically to say that it was my fault for using “special characters” such as a single quote in the name of the blog (which I had done). So I retried with their workaround (grumbling to myself that they could really stand to institute some error exception handling – I work in software development and it’s pretty standard to be able to handle special characters in any input field) and ran into the same error, but at one step later. I contacted them again by phone and again they told me it needed to be escalated to Tier 2 . A day later, Tier 2 support informed me that there was a problem with some tables in my SQL database and I needed to “drop” them. Well, I hadn’t added any tables – they must’ve been added by WordPress, even though it failed to initialize (grr). I dropped them, added a new name and was finally able to get WordPress installed. The only problem was that I couldn’t install my own theme or edit any CSS because I didn’t have permission (via FTP) to my new blog folder! I sent Tier 2 an email suggesting that they should give me permissions to my own file folder and by the way it would be nice if they put in some error exception handling (if not on the backend, at least in the UI to explain to users the issue). They never responded to that, but the next day, I had permission to edit my folder and was able to install a nice theme (Ice 1.0) and here I am!
As you can imagine, I wasn’t thrilled with the service, but they did get me through the problems and I do appreciate the free WordPress hosting and of course I love absurdity (after the frustration of it wears off, anyhow). 🙂
