Wordpress

Almost . . .

/ Tony / 3 Comments

For some time now, I have wanted to have another go at using Google Blogger as an alternative to WordPress. I intended when I signed up to Blogger, to use the site to cross-post writing that I had posted here. I considered this for a while but then read that ‘cross-posting’ was frowned upon in the blogging community. I also thought that it could be a good place to upload some of the creative writing I was working on.

This morning, I was reading a posting on Reddit from someone asking for help on deciding which site was the best to use. I, of course defended WordPress to the hilt, but was intrigued by some the comments regarding Blogger. It appears that since my last attempt, Blogger has improved and is now a credible arena for posting one’s thoughts.

I bit the bullet and logged on to Blogger. Well that was my intention. It seems that the password I used initially had expired due to lack of use, and I needed to reinstate my site by creating a new set of credentials (something I had not heard of before.)

After a good deal of “messing about” I finally got the site up and running again. My first thought was to create a paragraph to explain about the site. That done, the next job was to add an image or two. This is not as easy as the Blogger help forum states. I previewed the post at the end of the experience and decided it was not for me. Without being too critical, the theme(s) were not very attractive, the font display was too small, the images didn’t format correctly and the whole thing looked messy.

I have said goodbye to Blogger for the second (and hopefully the last) time. I’m going to stick with something I know a little about where I can get the help I need when I need it.

Testing time (again) . . .

/ Tony / 6 Comments

I’ve just installed the Jetpack mobile app for WordPress. It seems to all intent and purpose to be not much different from the original WordPress app.

I only tend to use the mobile apps to read and approve comments, so using the app may be a little bit of a challenge. We shall see.

So this is a test on an iPad. I shall test with my android phone at a later date.

Only problem I can see immediately, is that there doesn’t appear to be any way of fully justifying text. That is a disappointment, but that may be a feature yet to come.

It’s really intuitive and I have yet to find and master all its current features, so there may be some way to go yet.

I don’t see this replacing my desktop application, more of another string to my bow.

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So the original post was written on my iPad and then edited using Jetpack on my Android phone. Seems to work okay.

Trying again . . . or not

/ Tony / 1 Comment

Back at the very end of 2019, I took the decision to start using the WordPress Block Editor. I had previously been using some open source software called “Open Live Writer” or OLW for short. I had been quite happy with this but had been told (by one of the so called “Happiness Engineers”) that the OLW software was out of date and would no longer work with future versions of WordPress. So I stopped. It hadn’t been updated since 2017 so I believed they could be correct. There also seemed to be some issue with images being duplicated in the gallery.

I struggled on with the Block Editor for a while and then found that I could use Microsoft Word as a blog editor. As I had experience with Word, I gave that a go. Worked reasonably well, so I began using that. However it soon became clear that some of the posts were not formatted correctly, so I went back to the Classic editor. It’s not a very exciting editor and is no longer being developed by WordPress. I flirted with an application called “Net Writer 2” but that was not successful so I returned to the Block Editor and that has been my editor since.

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After a few tests, the issue with the duplication of images remains, and the only way around this is to save draft posts locally before posting them as a final draft on my blog. So at the end of the day, the Block Editor lives to ride again.

Good start to the day …

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We have been hoping that our youngest can come home for a weekend visit today. He has been in ‘lock-down’ at his care home since he went back on 28th December due to him and others testing positive for the virus. The ‘lock-down’ on his unit was lifted on the 22nd and preparations have been in progress since the 10th.

So this morning, K*** and me had our Lateral Flow Test. Not a particular pleasant event, but the result came back negative. This (I believe) means that neither of us have the virus and that our son can come home for the weekend. So two great positives there.

Then, K*** got a text message from the doctors say that she can now book her test. Another great one. However, that was soon short lived as twenty minutes later she got another text from the doctors apologising for getting it wrong. Apparently the doctors had been given incorrect information. But here’s the interesting thing, she was half way booking online at the centre I had mine and decided that she would wait for the doctors to call. When the second message came through, she went back online and booked her appointment without a hitch. All a bit mysterious.

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I am giving the desktop version of WordPress another go. I had given up with the app because of issues I was not happy with. One of the issues is with the way when the app opens, it opens with the last post you have written with the app. In my opinion, it should open at a blank page with the option in the file menu to open a previous post. It gets a bit annoying if you create a couple of posts via the browser or Blogpad on the iPad, and then use the Desktop app and it opens an old post. In this (ver 6.10.0) and previous versions opening a new post is done via the Window menu which is a strange way of working. I have mentioned this in the forums and the answer I received was that the app was still a ‘work in progress’. There doesn’t appear to be much difference that I can see from the last few versions but I will persevere and see where it goes.

A few pics and a bit of writing …

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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.)

Word Blog Post Test

/ Tony / 9 Comments

This is my 2nd attempt at testing Word as a blog post editor. Unfortunately, the Blog template does not support tags. However, if the post is uploaded as draft and then edited, tags can be added then. It should be noted though, that post will open as a ‘Classic Block’ unless the Classic editor is used. Formatting seems to work fine, but as I found out recently, the font displayed depends on the font supported by the chosen WordPress theme. Also fully justified text is not available unless the ‘Paragraph’ option is selected. The classic ‘Shift +Alf + J’ does not appear to work in the template.

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Last of the Year . . .

/ Tony / 2 Comments

This is the last (probably) post of 2019 and in a spirit of adventure, I am attempting to use the WordPress ‘Block Editor’ as opposed to my usual editor ‘Open Live Writer’. I’ve used Open Live Writer (OLW)ever since the demise of the Windows Live Writer (WLW). The last release of WLW, which was part and parcel of the the Microsoft Essentials package, was back in 2012 and the software was finally discontinued in 2017.

I have also used Microsoft Word as my editor, which given the complexity of that software, works quite well. At the end of the day, you have work with what works best for you, and as OLW is very simple to use, I’m probably going to stick with that. Although it has not been updated since 2017 which may mean I have to think again soon.

I am not entirely convinced that the Block Editor is for me. I think it might take me a little more time to get used to it, but for now I think I will stick to Open Live Writer. Better the devil you know and all that.

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So I’ll just wish everyone a Happy New Year, and here’s to the next one

More testing

/ Tony / 2 Comments

Derrr

I now see what I have been doing wrong. I had the Save setting to Save Draft, but when I close the editor, I was clicking on the Publish button in an attempt to publish as a draft post. I now realise that I do not need to select Publish from the editor. The post is saved regularly as a draft post and I can preview and amend as I do now.

So I now need to work on updating my skills to learn this new ‘Block’ editor. I don’t think I’m going to drop Open Live Writer as an editor, but I think I need an additional string to my blogging bow. It’s funny, I originally started using the WordPress editor before moving to Microsoft’s Windows Live Editor which was part of the Windows Essentials software. When this deprecated, I tried using the blog template in Microsoft Word before I found the open source software ‘ Open Live Writer ‘. So in a fashion, I have come full circle.

My thank must go to @themagicrobot who’s response in the WordPress Support Forums showed me the error of my ways.

A small world …

/ Tony / 5 Comments

Way back at the beginning of 2017 I posted about a familiar face popping up on FaceBook and how I was in two minds as to whether I should make contact or not. Looking back, I don’t think I posted that School palsI did get in touch. We had a good evening out some time later, and have kept in touch (on and off) ever since. In fact, we had lunch just recently. Now this is where the title comes in. At that first evening meeting we talked about our family and such. But then we got onto work, and it turned out that this old school friend worked for the son of my maternal grandmothers brother (my mothers cousin). Not only did he work for him, but he knew my grandmother and often visited her. All this came out at that evening out. And before you ask, we both did have that amount of hair in those days.

Then around June time, last year I noticed a post, again on FaceBook from a friend that I worked with way back in the late 1980’s. Back in 1986, I went to work as a clerical officer Typingfor the Local Authority. She started in 1988 as a clerical officer and left that job around 2001 which caused us to lose touch. The post in question was a reply to another post from a current local friend who knew this girl from college way back in the late 1970’s. Thankfully, although she now lives in New Zealand we are now back in touch again. She and her husband are a couple of the nicest people I know.

Leap forward to this month (May 2019) and the relative smallness of the world is again raising it’s WPhead. This time, through this very blogging platform. I was reading through some of the comments on a post I had just read. I often have a look at blogs of people who make interesting comments and this was no exception. One of the commenters (is that what they are called?) I visited had an interesting post that had an image of a place near where we used to live. I commented on the post and to cut a long story short, after a couple of messages I now find out that this person lives close to my wife’s father, and may even know him. I refer you back to the title …

Just had a bit of a test/trial …

/ Tony / 3 Comments

I’ve heard a bit about Gutenberg, the new WordPress editor so I thought I would give it a go. “Be bold.” I said to myself, “Don’t get in a rut” and a few other motivational phrases that I don’t want to go into.

My first impression was that it had a quite confusing interface, and I found switching from what they call “Block” and “Document” to add a tag or category, very frustrating. I like to addclipart430159 tags as and when they appear in my text. Then there is the text formatting which seems to be missing ‘full justify’ which is how I usually format my words. Embedding an image within a paragraph does not seem to work. There may be a way to do it, but I could not see how. I didn’t seem to be able to post my words as a draft post. Although I selected ‘pending’ as an option the post went live (now deleted). All in all, unless WordPress are prepared to give us a full tutorial, then I’m going to sit in my rut like the cowardly lion and stick to what I know. It’s the same feeling I had when Windows Live Writer was withdrawn (before I found Open Live Writer) and I tried using Microsoft Word to write a post. I would possibly get used to it, but in the end, is it worth the stress of change?

I can quite see, that WordPress might want everyone to eventually use Gutenberg, but until then, I’ll stick to Open Live Writer.

Problems might just be gone …

/ Tony / 1 Comment

For a few weeks now, I’ve been having performance issues with one of my Windows 10 laptops. I’ve uninstalled software that I rarely use, but the issue seems to have remained. What happens is that I’ll be using for example Microsoft Word and suddenly it hangs with the message “Word is not responding” and this will happen three or four times during the session. I end up having to restart Windows and hope the problem has gone away. Often this fixes the issue, but occasionally it doesn’t.

Today, while I was looking at the Task Manager application, I noticed something called ‘software reporting tool’. I had not seen it before and so I ran an online search and discovered that it is a program that checks to see if any software is going to affect the Google Chrome browser. There were reports that it has a high CPU usage when checking and the check often takes 20 minutes or so to run. The date on the file is 4th October which seems to coincide with the second time I had problems. Things seemed to improve after I removed my other printer, but then problems re-emerged a few days later.

The sites I looked at (and I always check a few to see if they say the same thing) told me that the process is not necessary and can be stopped. They also said that Google may restart the process again whenever the Chrome bowser updates. It gave instructions on how to prevent it running and how to prevent Google from restarting it. The instructions for this can be found at https://www.ghacks.net and searching for ‘how to block the Chrome Software reporter tool’.

It may not fix the problem, but the tool sends scan information back to Google, so there may be privacy issues here.

We shall see if there is any improvement.

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On another point, this was written using the WordPress editor on an iPad Mini. I had not thought of that as an option, but it seems to work quite well. I do need to understand how the HTML style tags work for formatting, but there must be a tutorial out there.

 

Blog editor trial – results are in …

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Now here is where in time old fashion I should say “In no particular order …” but I shall resist the temptation. Instead I shall just list some of the ‘pros and cons’ of the applications I have tried.

1. WordPress editor
Positives: ease of use, built in, WYSIWYG, available on all my devices
Negatives: formatting images not as good as Open Live Writer

2. Word
Positives: fully featured, WYSIWYG
Negatives: too many features, no tags, image manipulation not as good as Open Live Writer

3. BlogDesk
Positives:
Negatives: Could not get it to connect to blog

4. Open Live Writer
Positives: Ease of use, familiar, WYSIWYG, tags and categories easy to use, image control good
Negatives: Not been updated since 2015, random crashes

5. BlodPad Pro
Positives: ease of use, good when away from desk
Negatives: iOS only, image manipulation not easy

After a little amount of brain activity, I think I am going to stick with Open Live Writer as my main editor for the time being. However, I may be tempted with the WordPress editor. With it’s ability to be used on my laptop, my iPad, my wife’s iPad, old laptop and even my phone if the desire took me, it comes an extremely close second.


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)

 

Bye bye Blogger, Blogger goodbye …

/ Tony / 1 Comment

Not my interpretation of a 1970’s Bay City Roller’s classic, but me saying farewell to my blog on Google Blogger. I created the Blogger one in 2009, and it was my intention to ‘get my message’ out to as many readers as I possibly could. The idea was that I would write a post here in WordPress, then repost it in Blogger to maximise readership. It was not long after my first repost, that I discovered that this kind of activity was called ‘cross-posting’ and is highly frowned upon in the blogging community. I was advised that both blogs should be unique, but that I could reference each blog in the other. All seemed a little bit too much effort really. As a consequence my Blogger effort suffered which resulted in only five posts of which only four were unique. A few months ago I promised myself that I ‘must try harder ’ with what was called “At Home With The Hub 2”, and post more often on Blogger. FAIL !  I don’t really have that much to say that justifies having two blogs.

So this morning, with hand on heart I said goodbye and deleted the blog.

Back to the usual …

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Blodpad IconStill testing the Blogpad app on my iPad. A bit of a way to go yet, but I’m starting to get the hang of it. One of the downsides I’ve found, is that you cannot post your missives (is that what I mean?) as a draft in your WordPress blog. Well I’ve not found a way, if there is one. The way it works is thatBlogpad 2 it is stored as a draft in your defined storage area. You can then ‘preview’ your work and see how it looks, before finally publishing it as a live post. Another downside seems to be the ‘autosave’. I can’t find a setting that sets the autosave frequency. I Blogpad 3discovered, to my cost when the app crashed, that the crash happened before the ‘autosave’ kicked in, so I lost a good portion of the post. I’ve now decided to click/tap on the Save icon every 20 words or so.

This app is not going to be my main blogging editor, I’m still firm friends with Open Live Writer, but I needed something to work with when I go on holidays. Don’t want to take the laptop with me (K*** would kill me if I did) and as I have mentioned before, I’m not too keen on the WordPress built in editor. At the moment, there are more ‘up-sides’ than ‘down-sides’ to the app, although I’m not liable to have a tantrum, I just hope ‘up-sides’ continue to grow faster than the ‘down-sides’.

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I’m still having an issue with the WordPress app on the iPad. When I’m in the ‘stats’ screen and I click on the Notification Bell at the bottom right of the iPad app, the notification list comes up as normal. Now the issue is, that if I tap the Daily Prompt notification, I get a very unhelpful message telling me that there has been an ‘Error Loading The Post’. I hadn’t noticed this before, it’s only since I have been having a go at the Daily Prompt that the iPad app has become more active. Anyway, the good people in support are looking at the issue and I am hopeful they can come up with the solution.

Having another play with the new app …

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I found that the help/user guide is an upload from a WordPress blog, which is useful. There is still a lot to learn, but I think I’m getting there. I’ve discovered how to add links which was one of the things I was looking for when I posted lat time. I sometimes like to colour my text as an emphasis and this has proven more difficult than I expected. I did get there in the end, but it is not very intuitive. The spell checker seems to work quite well though. Would have like a ‘spell as you type’ but it is a free app, so can’t complain really. I also found the preview option. That works really well. Impressive!

Just giving it a try …

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The ‘it’ in question is the “Blogpad Pro” on the iPad. I normally write my posts on my laptop using the “Open Writer” software that replaced Microsoft’s “Live Writer” when said company decided to drop the application. I’m not a big fan of writing with the WordPress editor, and I wanted to be able to write a post if I’m away from/home and only have my iPad mini.

At first attempt, it seems to be quite good, but there are a lot of controls and features that I have not had chance to try yet, It’s still early days.

Hmmm … now that’s interesting!

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I have been using the WordPress.Com app for Windows 10 for a few weeks now. It’s okay when it works, but there have been a imagecouple of issues recently. For example, it is often very slow to to open. Sometimes posts do not update straight away and on a few occasions it has been known to simply crash and require a computer restart.

Usually faults like this can be rectified by reinstalling the latest version. However, attempting to download from the Microsoft Store results with a message telling me that the app is not available. Very strange, as version 3.2.0 is available to download direct from the WordPress.com website. I’m not the biggest fan of the Microsoft Store, but I would have thought an app such as this would be available. Is the reason that there are too many issues with the app that Microsoft no longer want to be associated with it? I don’t think that could be reason as there are many other apps in the Store that are simply rubbish. No there is some other reason that I’ve not quite figured out yet.

I still have the original version and will re-install it and see if is any better for a clean install, but I have my doubts.

Well I think this is interesting …

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Youngest is doing his usual Saturday ‘thing’ and watching YouTube videos on my laptop. He does this every weekend, after he has had his wash/bath, he’ll come down and sit at my laptop until his lunch is ready. I was going to use my older laptop to do some work on but I thought I would give this a go.

So, I am sat at the living room table, with my iPad Mini and TechGear bluetooth keyboard, writing this post directly into the iOS WordPress editor! An unusual experience to say the least. I think I may have tried using the editor before on my laptop, but usually like to write posts using Open Live Writer (OLW), which is a free piece of software born out of the now defunct, Windows Live Writer. If you’ve not tried OLW, can I suggest you give it a try. Back to the post in question!

I found the settings for Tags and Categories and managed to add some, but it is a lot harder to actually work with. In OLW I have a single button that will post some work as draft. I can then go into the web version of WordPress, check for any errors (there usually is a couple or six!) before I finally post. The iPad app seems to offer the same facility, but it is going to take me a while and a lot more practice if I’m going to make a habit of it.

One thing I have found, it seems to quite difficult to centre a line of text. There must be a way, but maybe not with this keyboard.

** Update** I think I may now know why. The Techgear bluetooth keyboard is mapped for an Android no iOS. There are (apparently) a number of differences between the keyboards of the two systems

A bit of a quandary …

/ Tony / 1 Comment

I’m going through a ‘should I … shouldn’t I?’ period at the moment. I’ll explain. I have had my WordPress blog for a few years now. I think I saw somewhere that it has been up and running since 2009. It’s a free plan and it looks like I’ve used around 3% of my allocated free space, which does not seem much. I have around 100 followers and have posted around 750 times. I have no posting schedule and no particular theme. So basically, I post what I want to, when I want to.

Back to the ‘quandary’ In the title of this post. One of my failings with this blog (in my opinion) is that I don’t post regularly. A friend has advised me that the reason for this is that it’s free! He claims, that if I had to pay a fee then I would either stop all together or make the most of it. Now, I enjoy doing what I do now, so stopping would not be on the table, but giving me another incentive to post might, just might be a good idea.

I have been looking at the Personal Plan upgrade as an option. The Business Plan is not something I need (I’m not a business) and the Premium Plan seems to be too advanced for the type of blog I write. So the question I’m asking, is it worth spending that £36.00 a year? My wife thinks I don’t use my blog enough to warrant the expense and tends to glaze over when I mention domain name, ad free etc. My current thoughts are that the increased storage would allow me to upload more/better photos for example, and I quite fancy having my own domain name.

I shall have to make a decision soon and I’m leaning toward upgrading but …

A new year … new beginnings? Perhaps …

/ Tony / 2 Comments

So, all those promises I made to myself about getting a part-time job within two months, turned out to be just bluff and bluster. Well …not really. I have been looking, but maybe not as hard as I could. At the moment, things are working out quite well and there is no urgency for me to supplement the pension I’m getting. Of course, that could all change. As R*** starts to increase his respite stays, income we get for him may (will) start to decrease and that’s when our financial situation will alter. But that’s in the future.

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Yet again, one of this years New Year Resolutions has been broken. I shall go into a little more detail here, if I may. K*** had wanted to watch the Robbie Williams new year show (I didn’t) and in the spirit of compromise, I gave in. My opinion …total rubbish … sexist and egotistical does not describe what we watched. Anyway, to cut a short story even shorter, we watched the London fireworks (fireworks on the TV don’t really work for me) and then K*** went to bed. I quickly changed channels to watch Jools Holland and his, now famous ‘Hootenanny Show’. Where is this taking us, I hear someone ask? Well, it was during a performance of Tilted by Christine And The Queens that I once again resolved to ‘post everyday‘ which I quickly modified to every two days. As the date of this post shows, that was a fail! It is now modified to ‘post more often‘, but even that may yet be modified.

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Now here’s a question for you. What do you use to write your blog posts? I know I’ve asked this before, but that was before I started with Windows 10. The reason I ask (again) is that I tried today to use the desktop WordPress app. It started okay, and I was able to write and my work was saved as a draft. But then the program crashed … repeatedly. It crashed so many times, that it became unusable in my opinion. So I’m back using the faithful Open Live Writer which works without any problems. Just wondering if anyone who uses the Windows 10 WordPress app have had similar problems.

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Wait a minute! Where does the “new beginnings” part of the title come in? I just thought it was a good sound bite!

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.

Let’s give it a go!

/ Tony / 2 Comments

Now usually I use a Microsoft Word template to write a post. However, I have decided to install the new WordPress app for Windows. I have tried a number of methods of writing posts since I started this blog. If I remember correctly I first used Windows Live Writer, which I was told was an ideal blogging tool built into Windows. I think there were some problems with that when I upgraded to Win 7.

I then had a go with the WordPress online editor, but did not like the old interface used at the time.

I then began to use Word 2013. We had got a great deal through work, that allowd me to purchase Office 2013 Premium at a much much cheaper cost. I was just using it to compose and then I would cut and paste the text straight into the WordPress editor. It was a bit of a bind, but I was using software I knew (and it has a much needed spell checker.) After a while, I discovered that Word 2013 had it’s own Blog Post template. One try and I was hooked. It was so easy to set-up and use and i have used it eversince with the occasional venture back to the online editor if my laptop was not available.

Back to where I started. I downloaded the app at the beginning of the week and was impressed with the speed of its loading. “Must give this a try!” I said to myself. Well I didn’t actually say anything, but the thought was in my head. For the first attempt, again I am very impressesed. Its simple and clean interface is quite refreshing and the only things I am missing at the moment is a spell checker, and a way to insert a Tab (always like to indent the first line of a paragraph …. old school.) I’ve not attempted an image yet. That is for the next Weekly Photo Challenge.