I should have known that modifying the .htaccess file was beyond the scope of my computing knowledge. Thankfully, I created a copy of the original file in my text editor before I made any changes. Because, I modified the .htaccess file and I broke my blog.

Chalk it up to imapatience that I am no longer getting any Google Search traffic. Like I mentioned earlier, I thought that maybe the solution had to do with having all of my pages as http://mysite.com vs. http://www.mysite.com. Upon scouring the web, I found that the way to do this was to modify the .htaccess file. So I tried and failed. I broke all of my permalinks. None of them worked - 404 errors throughout.

But a helpful fellow blogger (Randa) calmed me down. I then successfully uploaded my backup of the original .htaccess file. She also informed me of a plugin that would do the 301 redirect called enforce-www-preference. It seems to have done the trick. But I am exhausted after this roller coaster of a blogging day.