My sister has been in hospital for just over two with a very serious condition, which I won’t go into on here. Suffice to say, she was in a critical state and after the first night, we were told to ‘hope for the best, but be prepared for the worst’. Having special needs and learning difficulties has not helped the matter. However, she has fought and pulled through and has been waiting to go home since Thursday. The thing that has been really useful, has been Facebook. Or more accurately, Facebook Messenger. One of the family set up a group message, which we all subscribed to, and we have been using this as communication medium. It was far easier to message the whole group through this system, than to telephone or text each individual. It goes to show, that for all its faults, social media does have some powerful and useful tools.
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This blog has recently had a huge upturn. My efforts usually rewarded with the occasionally, random visitor who more often than not has a quick glance and moves on. However, I was reading a post from one of my followers and I read about a weekly photo challenge on The Daily Post blog. Basically, they provide a theme, and you post a photo on your own blog and ‘ping-back’ to the particular blog page on The Daily Post.
I thought that I had nothing to lose, so I gave it a try last week. I was amazed at how many visitors and like I received for a single picture and a few comments. So amazed in fact, that I posted again this week increasing my like and visitor count yet again. By the end of yesterday, I was getting quite giddy at the number of hits I had been getting. I may sound a little sad, but going from the occasional visitor to the numbers I have been getting makes this post a little pointless.
I wonder now, how many visitors this post will attract ……
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I am still toying with the idea of changing the theme of this blog, but am struggling to select a suitable (my opinion) theme, from the many free themes on offer.
Now I have mentioned this before, but am still interested in what application people use to write their blogs with. I use Word 2013, which comes with a ‘blog post’ template. I type up, proof read and format, including images, before publishing to WordPress as a draft post. I then go into the WordPress editor, add tags (does not seem to work properly if I embed them) and preview, before making any final adjustments and publishing. It works well for me, as I am a seasoned user of Microsoft Word.
From the keyboard of Tony 
I like WordPress.com better than some of the other free programs out there. It looks more professional, and using HTML can help with image alignment, etc. I’ve also got the Penscratch Theme, but I often end up using HTML to change the font size and colour. With a free theme, this means I have to format each paragraph separately.
As an experiment, I’m learning to use CSS on another website with a different theme. This one was free as well, but not from WordPress (although it works with WordPress.org, for which you need a host server.) With CSS, I can pre-format fonts and give them a reference label, which I then use rather than formatting separately each time. It saves a bit of time. I’m learning how to create various “boxes” in advance, too, so that I can insert an image in one, text in another, etc. It helps a great deal with ensuring everything is aligned properly.
For my current website, I type directly into the text editor. I sometimes format as I go along, and at other times–for longer blog posts–I type it out and then format it. I mark it as private and save it as a draft until I’ve worked the bugs out. When I was just starting out with WordPress, I didn’t realise this and posted each rough draft. Thankfully, the folks who use WordPress tend to be a tolerant crowd.
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Thanks for the comment and tips. I’ve never really tried working fully within the WordPress editor, but I may experiment with the next post and see how I go.
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Because your site consists largely of just text thus far, you wouldn’t have had much need to use the text editor. It’s useful for changing font size, aligning text and images, etc. You can right click on other sites and “inspect element” to see some of the coding. I learned largely by trial and error, but buying a book on using HTML and CSS was more helpful. I wish I’d done so at the start. 😦
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