Welcome to my blog

What a frustrating week I've had trying to set up my article directory. I'm terrible at understanding technical instructions and had to do many a google search before what I have done so far clicked.

I had 2 false starts when I tried to set a directory up on my own webspace. First of all I tried to install an article beach site and couldn't get it working properly. Then I tried Article Dashboard. I got everything on the site and started to customise but realised that the email confirmation for new joiners wasn't working. After many hours of searches and hair pulling out I realised that a thing called cron jobs exists and couldn't find any mention in my cpanel. I emailed the guy that I bought the space from and was told that they didn't allow cron jobs because of security issues. I understood but when I looked at the advertisement that I bought the space from cron jobs was there large as life.

For those of you who I am baffling with 'cron jobs' it's something to do with the site automatically sending confirmation emails, newsletters and news of posts etc. If you want your own article directory type site then make sure that you get a host that offers cron jobs.

Anyway I wasn't too bothered because I didn't pay much for unlimited space for life and already have something like 7 personal sites hosted there and the ability to host myself. I decided to pay a monthly fee for hosting the article directory with the recommended hosts.

I bought the space and started to publish the site. Every step of the way was more difficult and time consuming with the recommended hosts than with my own space. I finally got there and guess what? I couldn't get the cron jobs to work when I signed up for an authors account.

I joined the article dashboard forum and went through every recommendation posted by users. Nothing worked and I would have been bald if I had literally torn my hair out. I was almost ready to give up but emailed the recommended hosts first.

It turned out that I was using an hotmail account for the test author sign up and hotmail was filtering out the confirmation emails as spam grrrr. I might have thought about that one earlier if I hadn't signed up as an author on the Article Dashboard site and received the confirmation email with no problem. I added the BB-article site to my hotmail safe list and now everything is working great - I hope! Just got lots of customising to do but the site is ready for posts.

What I find strange about Hotmail is that they filter out emails that you want to receive as spam, yet the only spam I have received in that account in 7 years must have come through hotmail selling the address to spammers and scammers. I know that because I used it as a private address for 7 years.