It's Monday & It's Quiet

The hounds and I have been off to what feels like a slow start this morning, but things are getting done. I can’t believe it’s almost noon as I write this. I finally got a few ‘bugs’ worked out with the Firefox browser. It’s always been my browser of choice. A few years ago I started using a 3rd party password management program called LastPass. It will encrypt all the passwords that you use on the internet.

For the longest time Firefox and LastPass didn’t work well together … so I moved go Google Chrome.

I can say after a few days of switching to Firefox and with the LastPass ‘bugs’ worked out, I am really happy with the results. I have it set Firefox up to synchronize with my Firefox on my laptop … everything is working out great.

Before I ramble any further here are photos from this morning. I do know that photos of all the hounds are more interesting than my rambling.

After their normal morning activity … Stella ran full speed into Sadie wanting to play. I wasn’t able to catch the initial contact because I was picking up sticks in the yard but I heard the collision. I still find it strange that when they are outside, Sadie is always the one being ‘attacked’ on the bottom of the pile but it is reversed when they play inside.

Then just like that … in a split second … they stop and act like they haven’t done anything rough.

 
Soon after Sadie found a good stick to chew on while Stella roamed the field, to exercise her nose.

Stella was almost outside ‘her boundary’ but when I called her name, she came flying back into the yard. I can’t really describe that last photo besides just excess bloodhound skin in action.

I’ve spent most of my morning doing some online research, making lists, checking some of my spreadsheets … I have plans developing and that is always dangerous, in a joking way. For some reason the internet seems slow today. I’ve had some weird stuff going on with my older desktop computer whereas I can do the same task on my newer (less than 1 yr old) laptop without any issues.

The common fix seems to be digging deep into my operating system files, deleting a file called “cert8.db”, then rebooting the browser. That fixes the issues with error pages when loading a site.

Another thing this morning I am getting notices via the WordPress plugin I have that detects broken links in my blog. A lot of those are URLs for the photos I transferred inside the posts when I transferred from my free blog on WordPress just this past week. The photos worked before, some of them still work today and some will not load.

Is that happening on your computer when you load my blog or look at one of the pages listed inside the red banner at the top? Let me know if you are not seeing all the photos loading either in an older post or one of the pages listed inside the red banner.

I have also been very happy with my move not only to WordPress but also using DreamHost as my blog host. It’s a little more work than having a blog on the ‘free’ side of WordPress or Blogger but they make it very very easy to set up and manage.

For 16 years I’ve been buying the majority of my domains from GoDaddy but found DreamHost from a blog reader. The domains are a few dollars cheaper than what I paid at GoDaddy. Loading the WordPress blog was a 1-click installation. Their customer service is fast when answering questions via email and very knowledgeable if you choose to chat with a representative.

I had my new blog up and running in less than an hour. Most of that time was me customizing my template (theme).

Be sure to check out their hosting program, besides just buying a domain.

Well I am finished at 12:21pm typing this and no word from Stella yet that she would like to have lunch. I guess the playing outside made her and Sadie wore out because they are both sleeping right now.

Sadie & Stella Have a Burst of Energy

It’s been one of those days here in the ‘tropics’ of Southern Indiana. Too warm to snow, cold enough to have to wear a coat, and the ground is too wet/soggy to go for a walk … but the bloodhounds had a sudden burst of energy this morning. I’ll let the photos do the talking.

I’m not sure they will get much more done today … they have been sleeping every since.

If you want to read about my efforts this morning or the 1st half of the day, to move Heidi’s blog and hopefully the other blogs to her(their) new dot com site, hosted by DreamHost then read from here on. There is some humor, a little frustration, few questions, a lot of head scratching and 2nd guessing.

First of all when I talked to a friend about this a few weeks ago, even before moving to WordPress, she told me “if you are not going to make money off of a site then why pay for a domain and a host for that site.” Estimated depending where you buy the domain and hosting service .. but a $100 – $125 per year.

So I decided to move my blogger blog to the free WordPress side. I liked the dashboard, all of the themes. I even found 4 different themes that I really liked for each blog. They all seemed to fit, if you know what I mean. In this story I am about to tell it will be important that you remember what I just said about ‘themes’.  :)

I had some good sleep Thursday night. No health issues like the night before. Stella wakes me Friday morning, I feel rested, a couple of cups of coffee and I am ready to move some blogs from here to their new domains, onto a host and publish online. Should be easy.

Over the years since I last did this type of work at home, everything seemed to be a one-click operation. I had Heidi’s blog moved within minutes. Her domain showed up online within 30 minutes which I thought was extremely fast. DreamHost had a WordPress app where with one-click it installed Heidi’s blog without an issue.

Luckily last week when I was uploading photos from my computer to WordPress’s “Media Library” I had made a folder for each hound. I did not find out until today why I did that.

I followed the steps furnished to me by DreamHost. Heidi now had a new WordPress.org site, hosted by DreamHost and showing up online with her .com domain. Once I uploaded the photos again from my computer, Heidi’s folder to her new WordPress “media library”, all the photos matched up with the imported blog posts and were correctly installed.

All of her posts were there, the categories, the tags, about page, contact page … EVERYTHING … but … the theme.

Remember what I said a few paragraphs ago about ‘themes’?

Sure they only showed 20 different themes to use in the default setting but after I clicked that “add more”, I had 2,168 themes to chose from and as I scrolled through not even a 1/3 of them I notice my data counter is spinning like you would see dollar/cents on a gas pump. When you only have 15Gb per month on your internet service plan and only had 700 Mb left for the month with 5 days to go …. data spinning out of control is NOT want you want to see happening!!!

The bottom line was, out of 2,168 themes available, NONE of the themes I am using on the free side of WordPress were available on the .org side of WordPress. They didn’t show up when I searched them, they didn’t get answers back when I asked on the support forums.

By the time I had noticed and shut off my browser due to data usage going out of control, I received an email from my internet service provider that I had used my monthly allotment of 15Gb’s. Of course there are options and that is an expensive option in my book … I can buy more Gig’s at $10 per 1Gb until my new billing cycle starts on the 27th.

Now that I have ran over my limit, I still have internet access but at “dial-up” speeds … if the page loads at all.

Or I can stay up from Midnight until 5am and use all the data I want, like I always can between those times of night. High speed will be the norm during those 5 hours, it’s called their “free data” on my plan.

Let’s get back to the blog issue and a domain name.

So I have a blog with it’s own domain name and that makes it look so official, yet there is not one theme that I want to use. I like the theme that Heidi has on her blog now, on the free side of WordPress.

I’m not sure I want to move forward on moving everything to a .com domain. Really what is the reason? Those words of my friend a few weeks ago, echo in my brain. I basically have 4 blogs set up the way I want them. All I have to do from now on is post, answer comments and “let it ride”.

Oh, I thought about all of this before and even from what I read I might have to rebuild some of the blogs that I would transfer to WordPress’s .org side of the house. Other writers kept saying it was just soooooo important that I own my own blogs, not letting a ‘free’ host keep control of them.

I just received an email from my forum question about my theme or the three themes. It’s sad that the solution is so simple. It is something I saw when I chose that theme early this week. The maker of the theme, WordPress.com has a “download” button on theirs to where all I need to do is download the them to my computer, upload to Heidi’s .com site. How easy is that … and how brain dead I am at times. LOL

So with that answer you can tell where this is going … back to Heidi’s site to get her theme uploaded. If that goes smooth then I will be able to move Stella’s, Sadie’s and even mine by the end of today.

Of course that changes all the domains again. I will will post them here and on the hound blogs once I know for sure that each site works.

Back to my Exede Internet provider. Due to my location I don’t have any other choice but satellite internet. Believe me I looked and called every possible provider in June 2014. This is it. My speeds will eventually trickle to where I can’t even load an email or a website, even though they tell me that’s not possible because I will always have access, just not high speed access.

It will become so slow I will have no choice but to buy more data or have to stay off the internet until January 27th. That might actually be a good thing … lol … a little vacation.

Now I’m headed back to some computer work and it should go fairly fast now that I know how to get those themes loaded. Will I have the internet speed to do it??