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A few pics and a bit of writing …

/ Tony / Leave a comment

I have recently been updating my ‘Google Sites‘ page. It’s a strange thing, but until a couple of months ago, I had forgotten I had the site. I have been asking one or two ex-colleagues and they tell me that we all created one as part of our departmental social network. It was back in 2009 and I never really used it at work, in fact I didn’t put anything on the site until the middle of last year when I received an email telling me that the site needed some maintenance. All that meant was that I needed to add a recovery email.

It’s not as intuitive as Google Blogger and like the way WordPress seems to be heading, content is created in blocks. Since I have the site, I thought I might as well use it, but I didn’t know what I would use it for. It then struck me. I do a little bit of ‘creative writing'(?) and was tending to put little bits on my Google blog, but it’s a quite boring site and I don’t really know what I can do there. With having this paid blog on here, it didn’t really make any sense to use Blogger. But I didn’t want to post my writing attempts on WordPress, as I thought I would have to create a new page to put the musings, to keep them separate and I didn’t want to do that. I think some blogs can look a bit messy with many pages.

So that’s what my ‘Google Sites‘ is going to be used for. Because scrolling through a long page full of text may be a little tiring, I have interspersed the writing with some of my photographs. All the writing is my own, and one day I shall bundle them all together and publish my own book, although it will probably be some kind of eBook. It is still a ‘work in progress’ but I will keep updating it (when I remember.)

Start with someone else’s words…

/ Tony / 1 Comment

“True friends stab you in the front”

I’ve been reading up on various websites about the “art of blogging”. There are so many ‘helpful’ people trying their best to help you/me become a better blogger. Most of them seem to want me to follow their blog and maybe contribute financially to their blog. I tend to pass these by once I see the ‘Donate’ button. Occasionally, one site/post will catch my eye. A particular blog suggested that it is often a good idea to start your blog with someone else’s words, as a hook to get potential readers interested. So this is the point of this post.

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I’m going back to 2011. My eldest son, S**** and I are at the Leeds Festival (or Leeds Fest as it it known colloquially). We have just watched the band Madness and he is going off with Leeds Festhis friends to do what young people do at festivals. I’m trying to be the ‘trendy oldie’ and I’m thinking I’m going to see the next band … whoever they are. Turned out they were a Sheffield band called “Bring Me The Horizon”, who’s music at the time was defined as “metalcore” which was something I had no idea about. So there I was, at the grand old age of 56, wearing a skull bandana, wishing I still smoked waiting for this band to appear.

It was loud … very, very loud. The singers voice just seemed to screech all the time, but the music was very addictive. I stayed for the whole set … including  a particular song that was apparently BMTH 2011called “Wall of Death”. This involved the singer telling the audience to form a large circle. By this time, I was towards the centre of the audience and people were beginning to move backwards. the circle was getting bigger and bigger. There seemed nowhere for me to go. I asked a young man who was near to me, what I should do. His words were “Just run and don’t stop!” Which is exactly what I did. There is a YouTube video that shows the event, but the photo here shows the scale. I was never more scared and excited in my life. Although you will ne be able to make me out, I was somewhere near the bottom righthand corner.

Ever since that day, I have enjoyed listening to BMTH who’s music which has turned somewhat into what some call “pop metal”.

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Now to the point. The quote is from a song by BMTH called True Friends. The quote is based on a quote by Oscar Wilde, and it is claimed that it is not about anything/anyone in particular.

So that is my attempt at “Start with someone else’s words” Lets see how this one goes.

Some people just won’t take no …

/ Tony / 2 Comments

I keep getting followed by a blogger/organisation or whatever that I’m not interested in. Each time they appear, I remove them. But like one of those rashes, they keep coming back. Itchy RashI have been removed from a couple of sites over the past few years and I take the view that “If they don’t want me to see their words, then I don’t want to see them”. It is as simple as that. I may try and follow again, but if rejected twice, then it’s their loss not mine. However, some just don’t get it. I’ve looked at the site and it appears to be some kind of American recruitment site. Now I accept, that after the farce that is Brexit is over we may need to look to other parts of the world, I don’t think I’ll need the kind of recruitment service this blog offers.

The next time they follow, I’m going going to ask them why. Why they are following a semi-retired Council worker from the UK

Fake follower or not …

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Well the answer to that is that I don’t really know. I mean, how do you tell?

I received a notification that a ‘blogger’ had liked a post and was now following me. Of course I was interested to know who they were and to have a look at some of their posts. On opening their site I was surprised to see that the Assassin Creed only post was the standard start-up “This is your first post” entry and that the about page was the the start-up page also. It was also worrying that the name consisted of word with what looked like random numbers after it. It didn’t help that his/her chosen avatar looked like someone from the Assassin Creed books.

It might just be that they are new to WP, but (as good as I believe they are) I think it slightly unlikely that my posts would be the first that a ‘newbie’ would find. I did consider reporting the site as being a spam site, but there was no proof, there was no anything really. So I did the only thing I could think of and that was to remove them as a follower. As I understand, they can follow me again, and maybe that time it could be different.

Decisions, decisions …

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When I first had the idea of creating a blog, I sought some online advice as to how I could go about getting my thoughts online. It became apparent, quite quickly that the free version of WordPress was the way to go. I toyed with Blogger, but it seemed to lack any kind of quality so I went for WordPress.

Much of the advice centred on the software I could/should WLWuse to get my message into the blog. Quite a few people said that if I wanted an off-line editor, then there was not much to fault the built-in Windows program “Windows Live Writer” or WLW as it became known. This was part of a suite of applications called  “Windows Live Essentials” that came, ready to use with Microsoft Windows. It seemed the most logical way to go, and most of my earliest posts were written using WLW. Then, OLWas is usual with Microsoft, it was announced that Windows Live Essentials was being run down and no further development work would be done. Around about the same time coincidently, a piece of software appeared called “Open Live Writer” (OLW). This was an open-sourced version of Windows Live Writer set to replace the former. I have used this now for a long time, being my prefered editor.

Now to the point. Over the past few months, I have had a couple of occasions when uploading a post from OLW, that the upload fails and the post is lost (the draft post seems to get corrupted). The problem is that there has been no development work on OLW for some time, and it is now beginning to show its age. In fact a post that I was going to upload yesterday failed and was lost. So now, Im beginning to think that it is time to move on again and choose anothe blog editor for my laptop.

I’ve done a little research and have come up with the following options:

  • Continue with OLW
  • Use the WordPress editor (this was written with the WP editor)
  • Blogdesk
  • Microsoft Word
  • Windows Notepad and paste into the WP editor or
  • some other paid for application (not my ideal choice)

So for the next few posts, I will be writing using a different method each time to test which I find is the most suitable method.

(Written using WordPress editor)

 

It’s often described so …

/ Tony / 1 Comment

Not so by fellow bloggers, but by ‘the great unwashed’ that don’t have a blog. I think I have blogged about this before (can’t find the post though), but often get the comment “So what’s your blog about? ” to which I always reply, “It’s not about anything really.” That’s when I get the comment “That’s a bit vague, isn’t it? ” Well it maybe, but if they took the risk and read it, they could be surprised.

But that’s not what I wanted to talk about. If you’ve been kind enough to have a look at my profile, you will know I’m a knitter. About 3 years ago, I was asked by a ‘friend’ to help with a knitting pattern. Talk about vague, the pattern was originally written in French, and then badly translated into Greek and then even worsley(?) translated into English. It must have translated by someone who could not speak either Greek or English and possibly not French originally. I did eventually manage to get hold of the French copy and, with a lot of help got it translated into English. The problem was with the written description. There was a chart, and it was that that I used to translate it.

First successful Blogger post …

/ Tony / Leave a comment

     I have been trying for some time to get Open Live Writer (OLW) to work properly with Google Blogger. I could actually connect and post, but one of the best features of OLW is the facility to download the blog theme. This enables you preview your post in draft mode, before you finally upload to Blogger. I use this with my WordPress Blog (unashamed plug there) and it worked without any issue. However I simply could not get OLW to download the relevant files. I tried raising the issue with the OLW forum, but that did not help. The answer came in an unorthodox way!

     I had a problem with my Google account password. Somehow it needed to be reset. I managed to reset to a new password, but then found a problem with Outlook 365. I was now unable to connect Outlook to my Gmail. Every time I tried to enter the new password, it failed. No passwords, old or new were being accepted. I tried removing my Gmail account and re-adding it, without success. I securebegan the process of adding Gmail to my Outlook.com. It took a Google search to find out the issue. It seems, that back in 2014 Google started to block, what it considered to be unsecure logins. This was the problem and I needed to amend a security setting. I needed to “Allow less secure apps” to be ‘ON’. Problem with Gmail/Outlook sorted. The relief was massive. I really did not want to have to use Outlook.com as my main email client for many reasons.
     It then struck me! “Hmmm,” I thought. “I wonder if that is the problem with downloading the theme for Blogger?” It seems that it was. So there we are. All sorted.

Funny old week …

/ Tony / 4 Comments

I’m not going to mention Britain leaving the European Union (well maybe a little) as I think it has all been said. All I will say is that I’m very disappointed with the result. I fully expected it to go the other way but as many people keep saying “Democracy has spoken” or words to that effect. So we have to live with it. Get on and make it work. It will take a long time to convince me that the country ‘did the right thing’ but there is no going back now.

Then to cap it all England was unceremoniously dumped out of the Euro 2016 football tournament last night. Beaten by a team that, on paper should have lost. But that is what we have come to expect for a team that just does not seem to have any spark at all. Of course it is all the fault of the manager. It’s not the fault of the bunch of second rate no-hopers that were out there playing the game. No it’s the managers fault. No other industry would it happen.

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Breaking news … I have just spotted a Police Community Support Officer walking down our road

Now that is something that does not happen very often!

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Now, back to the job in hand. I have a cold. A full on, streaming, head aching cold. It started yesterday afternoon really and just got gradually worse. I can’t stop sneezing! I’ve gone through about 12 handkerchiefs today alone. One of my colleagues had the same thing last week, and I was hoping that I would not get it … but of course I did. I’ve not been to work today, and I’m staying at home tomorrow. Hopefully, I will be okay for Thursday but time will tell.

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K*** is out tonight. She is going with her sister to see Cats at the Leeds Grand Theatre. It’s not the kind of thing I would want to see, so I’m home alone. Well home alone with R*** to keep me company. Should be fun. He only came back from respite yesterday and it is all change for him. Up until yesterday, his daily routines would start from what was called ‘Day Opps’. This was an area that he and the only other ‘daily’ resident used as their base for the day. R*** also has a flat where he stays when he is on respite. The change has come about due to the other resident moving on. This means that they need to area for some other activities.

R*** is now going to be based out of his flat. We were expecting to have a bit of a rough ride with the change, but he appears to have accepted the change without any issue. I say ‘appears’, we never really know what is going on in his autistic mind when these major changes happen. The next few days will be the telling time.

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I think I have given in with Blogger. You may recall that I wanted to use Blogger as another blogging platform. It was going to be used as an outlet for a project I was working and I did not want it to get mixed up with my main WordPress blog. I think I have mentioned that I use a piece of software called “Open Live Writer (OLW)” for composing my posts. This software boasts that it connect to WordPress (which it does quite effectively) and also to Google Blogger. It is Blogger that I’m having an issue with. In OLW there is a tab, that lets you preview how your post will look, before you upload it. With WordPress, this works without a problem. However with Blogger, I cannot get it to show a preview. I know others have had the same issue, but it is a community project and so the support is a bit limited. So, after much deliberation, my Blogger blog is going.

How did it look ?

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     Well the text handling did what I had hoped for. I was able indent the first line, no problems (someone has since advised that all I need to do in Writer is hit the spacebar five times). Paragraph indentation worked well, but will I use it ? Not sure. Inserting a single image was not really a problem, except for the sizing issue. I understand that the image style I chose was the problem with space. I chose a random style that had a part mirror image at the bottom. What it does is creates another image, inverted and fades it. So basically it was one image on top of the other. There also seemed to be no way to add tags easily. Writer does have a plugin, which does it in a round about way. It’s not perfect, but it’s there. I miss the Writer preview function and the ability to write in the blog format, which is a  really useful feature.

     I also found that I could upload the whole document to my WordPress blog, but I usually cross-post to Blogger, which did not seem to allow me to use images. Writer does not have this problem. So, for the immediate future, it looks like I will stick to Writer.

Having a go …….

/ Tony / 2 Comments

I’ve decided to have a go at ‘proper writing’. Well a short (very short) story anyway. I spotted a competition, in the Wetherby News, to write a short ghost story for the Friends of Harrogate Library. I mulled over it for a week or two, then decided I had nothing to lose, and so, inspired by a fellow WordPress blogger (Sue Healy) I had a go. The competition closes on the 5th November, so I hope to hear something soon after. Fingers crossed it is not all bad.

Remember I mention a so called email course I was doing. Turned out not to be as good as I thought. There should have been 18 parts to the course, however parts 10 through to 15 did not get emailed. I emailed them back and asked to re-send the missing parts, and left a message on their message board, but to no avail. I still have 6 parts missing, so a bit of a disappointment.

Apparently, the youngest escaped from his class again !! This time he was just in the school grounds, but again, no message from school !!! They either think, that it is not worth worrying about and that he was quite safe, or there is some other reason, which is even more worrying. I think Mrs H, may have to talk to the Head or Deputy Head.

Not a lot

/ Tony / 1 Comment

   I just realised today, that I’ve worked for the same service now for 20 years !!! Of course, the job has changed a lot, and I suppose I have too. It’s funny to think, that out of all the people that worked there when I started, there are only 5 of us left. But what is scary is that in 10 years time I will have retired !!!!

  Another thing that amazed me was that this blog has been going almost a year. I did blog for a short while on Windows Live Spaces, but never got any hits, and before that I had a blog on Google Blogger, but that was just tiresome (I hear it’s better these days). Then I found WordPress and nearly 300 posts later, I have not looked back. I said right at the start, that I may need to blog on a theme. Well that has not happened, but I could say, that is ‘work in progress’. My stats have gone a bit wild today. I average between 3 and 6 views a day, but today I hit 28 views. Well pleased.