Thursday, September 1, 2011

Welcome to House Eller

You may have noticed a little change to the blog. We purchased the houseeller.com domain and are now publishing there. It's a little thing, but getting here wasn't as easy as it should have been.

When we made the decision to purchase the domain name, I looked at a couple options to purchase it. I decided to buy it through Blogger/Google because they set everything up for me. I like easy, and that seemed the way to go since the cost was pretty much the same no matter how we did it.

It wasn't that easy. I guess partly it's my fault. I was using my iPad (Have you met my iPad? His name is Helo.) so I blithely walked through the purchase steps on it. Turns out Google Checkout, which is how you purchase through Google, didn't like using a mobile device. Unlike just about every other service on the web, it distinguishes between devices. And it wanted me to have a Google Checkout account on my computer first. Which I could then link to Helo.

So I thought I made my purchase. I even got a confirmation email. Then the fun came. The next day, I couldn't get in to view my purchase (I think I did once and saw something that said cancelled, but I couldn't get back to it). I followed the link in the email to link my mobile purchase to my computer. And kept getting errors that it couldn't find the information.

I somehow ended up creating a new Google Checkout account, not linked to Helo, and couldn't find a way to link them after the fact. Google Help was no help. Apparently, if you have an actual problem, you are out of luck. All the Help articles were basic instructions on how to set things up initially - actually more of a FAQ than Help.

Have you ever tried to contact Google about a problem? You can't. You can fill out their form once you dig through layers of unhelpful help, but you get an autoresponse that they can't address each individual problem, but have you checked out Help? (Yes, I did. That's why I tried to email my problem.) There is no chat help, no phone number. You can try the message boards and see if someone somewhere might have had this same issue and found a solution. But you can't actually get help from Google.

After verifying that the domain wasn't properly set up, I tried to purchase it again, but it wasn't available. Well crap. Time to leave this for the day and cool off.

Wednesday rolls around (I tried my original purchase Monday night). houseeller.com was still not set up. I had given up on looking at anything through Google Checkout since that was useless. I tried to purchase the domain name again, this time from the computer.... and it went through! When I got my confirmation email, I didn't hold out much hope. But then I got a second email with links to setting up administrator accounts! And this morning Blogger had magically migrated the blog over to the new domain.

Lesson learned: Google doesn't like mobile devices.

So, I welcome everyone to the new houseeller.com. Same blog, just with our custom domain. It only took 3 days to get here, but we made it.

1 comment:

  1. Congrats on finally getting the domain through! Darn google anyway. If they're going to rule the Internet, they should be benevolent gods, not obnoxious, hard to reach ones.

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