or … when it rains it pours
The Café Ludwig “gateway to my online presence” had been getting long in tooth. It no longer made Google happy as it was not designed to accommodate mobile devices. It was built the old-fashioned was using Microsoft Expression Web (if anybody remembers that). I decided on a total rebuild and used the WordPress “engine”.
WordPress, with its blogging roots, allows for a blog even when used as a “regular” website tool. I tucked the blog into a corner and used it for a few news stories. I decided to use the Café Ludwig blog to participate in Blogging 101, a WordPress training course. That course was meager in technical instruction but long in “community” building. WordPress ties the bloggers together with it Reader that allows following blogs and finding posts by topic “tags”.
It wasn’t long before I discovered that my blog posts did not come up in the Reader. Other participants complained that they could not “follow” my blog. Nothing in the course helped me set things right. I struggled most of the month of January trying to find the fix. Finally I heard from a WordPress “happiness engineer”. Here is an excerpt from that communication.
The Reader topic pages only show posts from WordPress.com blogs. So much for using self-hosted sites for blogging.
One of the tasks in the course was to set up an event to allow bloggers to work together. I had started “Monday Window” a weekly feature showing photos of one or more windows and invited other bloggers to participate. This, of course did not work well at all. My solution was to throw in the towel and move the event to a WordPress.com blog.
Then this:
The Edge browser in Windows 10 kept picking on my Café Ludwig site, flagging it as “potentially harmful”. It is legit! The thought occurred that I should replace “café” with a stronger beverage.
The Monday Window weekly parade of windows from around the world is now anchored at a “proper WordPress.COM blog” come see, come join:
© 2016 Ludwig Keck
This 'n That 
Goodness, Ludwig! What a trial. You probably know that you can use your self-hosted URL on WordPress.com now that you have a WordPress.com site. You’ll still get follows and all the perks of being on WordPress.com. Plus, if you want to preserve all your previous site posts and pages, you can bring them over as well. If you haven’t done all this and want to, the happiness engineers can help you. They’ve been wonderful to me. It’s best if you can get into a chat with one of them. That’s a little tricky, if you’re not a premium user, but sometimes it works. They really do want us to be happy here.
Thank you, Kathryn.
I have been a premium user for many years – Ask Ludwig has been WordPress hosted all along. I have a handful of WordPress.com blogs. But I also engage in a number of non-blogging activities, including a couple of business ventures, these are self-hosted elsewhere because I need a number of additional features. Many of those are provided by plugins and make the WordPress engine very advantages. What I have not done before is use those other websites for blogging until my participation in Blogging 101 when I decided to use the blog option at Cafe Ludwig. Unfortunately the friendly happiness engineers helping with the course did not point out the limitations even when several participants were struggling. It was frustrating and still leaves a bitter taste.