An Afternoon Of Study

It’s been almost 10 years … 10 years? Yep, 10 years already, since I last worked behind the scenes of a website inside a control panel. It could be long tedious work for those that were not ‘geeks’ or ‘experts’ …. like me.

So today with the hounds sleeping their normal hours, the temps colder than I prefer, the dog food bought, the FJ filled with some gas and a fresh bag of coffee … it was time to refresh how to set up websites hosted by someone other than Blogger or WordPress.

I’m still not finished, but making progress and actually remembering more than I thought I would.

The hounds want to go “.com”

Today still included the periodic trips outside. It was clear blue skies and sunny … still the hounds didn’t go far nor wanted to.

After some consideration I decided I was not in the ‘teacher mode’ this morning with Stella and was willing to take the chance with her shut in the bedroom with Sadie while I made a short trip to the ‘big city’ … just downtown.

She passed in flying colors, just like she use to and was thrilled when I was walking in with a 40# bag of dog food. She thought it was all hers.

The feedback seems to be very positive about the hounds each having their own blogs. Ownership of the photos are still in negotiations. Sadie, Stella and Heidi are unwilling to budge in what they are offering for exchange.

I think tonight is going to be watching a movie from my collection unless I find a movie on tv … doubtful. I pay Directv for more ~250 channels and rarely watch more than 7-8 of them.

All is good though, with a couple of bags of M&M’s with peanuts, Keebler’s Pecan Shortbread cookies and some ice cold milk.

It’s a pretty quiet night here in the ‘tropics’ of Southern Indiana.

Still Did The Dog Walk

It’s been one of those days no matter how much heat you have turned on inside, you can feel cold, freezing air from somewhere. Once we stepped outside for the afternoon walk around 2pm, it was bone chilling crazy. Heidi almost went. I was really hoping she would back out just because it was too cold for her.

She had been out earlier right after lunch and you can tell by this photo, the concrete floor was too cold for her.

Stella and Sadie went outside but they were not going far … that is until we went for the afternoon walk. I had the Mountain Hardwear Down parka on, with the hood fastened in front of my face with the velcro ends. It was warm. No photos of the walk and it was a good thing I didn’t take my camera.

We were not a 1/3 of the way into the walk when a series of high powered rifles sounds were coming from some property surrounding the field. Sadie stood and stared. Stella laid her ears back and that 25′ retractable leash was maxed out in 2 seconds. She was going to get out of there no matter what. I guess her chances of tracking deer that have been shot are slim and none.

We completed the walk with no problems. Stella finally calmed down the second half of the walk. By the time we finished all of use were freezing and sprinted to the house. Heidi met us by raising her head off the Mexican blanket in the large chair in the living room, where she continued to sleep.

Last night during the Denver/Pittsburg NLF game, I finished a jar of peanut butter. Before I could toss it to Sadie to clean up, Stella grabbed it out of my hand to lick the rest out with her tongue as far as it could go inside the jar. She finally gave it back to me later, so I could rinse out the jar and recycle. At the time the photo was taken she was not letting go of it. Then about the time I took the photo … she moved.

It was a good day here in the ‘tropics’ of Southern Indiana.

Getting Back To Hounds & RVs

I noticed very late last night after I had deleted all of the blog posts I had transferred from my old Blogger blog, the last 4 out of 5 posts were not about Hounds nor RVs. It was all about the attempted blog transfer, with WP questions/frustrations.

I then wrote on Friday about things in general, while posting some old photos never seen before on the blog. I had nothing else to write about. So I decided it was time to get back to writing about the hounds along with occasional thoughts on RV. Believe me, those traveling thoughts are always with me.

First let me tell you about an outstanding post written by Lynne over at Winnie Views a few days ago. I read it yesterday morning for the first time and it made my eyes wide open. It’s long, detailed, but is loaded with information about what is taking place with the wildlife refuges throughout the USA. It’s news you will not hear on the mainstream media unless there’s something the networks can show to increase their viewership and make money, like the Malheur occupation up in Oregon.

It’s Sunday, where’s my temperatures in the low teens? and that snow storm the snowing has started. Stella’s new wake up time seems to be 5:49am. She will go around poking me with her nose and quiet whining. At that time she is also waking up Sadie and Heidi. She also expects the be fed breakfast after she makes her first trip outside. That is what she is really wanting at 5:49am. It’s the only time of the day that I don’t have to yell for any dogs to “come on” when they are outside. They return to the door on their own. Even Heidi.

Being retired I don’t want to start my day at 6:10am every day. I don’t mind it sometimes, but not every day. So the routine after they come back inside, is to shut off the lights and head back to bed for a little more sleep. Then we will get up and they are fed breakfast. I turn on the computer and make coffee as it boots up.

For the 2nd day in a row it felt much colder than the thermometer was showing, the hounds have not had a real interest in staying outside long. They haven’t played outside for days and sleep inside most of the day.

So there hasn’t been a lot of photos of them in ‘action’ lately … because there hasn’t been any action .. lol.

I forced their hand this morning. After my 1st cup of coffee, with the ground of the field in back finally solid after the snow melted, I not only asked if they wanted to “go for a walk” but also grabbed my trusty Nikon D3200 with the stock 18-55mm (didn’t work again!!) 55-200mm lens. By the way, Sadie and Stella have never said “no” to that question. Sunshine would have been a nice additional feature but we are in a period of gloomy dark skies here in the ‘tropics’ of Southern Indiana.

Just about the time we stepped outside, there were snow flurries but nothing major. With my 20 year old Mountain Hardware goose down parka w/hood I knew we could handle any weather change in the next 20 minutes.

Just About To Turn The Corner

Deer At Times Around This Corner

As we walked I had the retractable leash to Stella in one hand and my camera in the other. She was pretty good about stopping each time I focused in to take a photo.

Just to Sadie’s right on the photo above is the route taken by the deer sprinting and jumping over a mashed down fence sprinting flying across that field. When Sadie was younger and the field was full of deep snow – she followed those deer as fast as she could. I couldn’t catch her nor find her later but she came back to the house 5 hours later.

As we made the turn at the halfway point to head home I could see on the horizon the snow as coming down harder but not really a lot of snow. Almost a sideways direction but very small flakes. This storm wasn’t going to amount to much.

There is deer traffic that cross this path on the way home. They come from that tree line you see when we start the walk and then into a small wooded gully in the direction that Stella is facing. Always good to have her on a leash for times just like these, when something has peaked her interest.

What Does She Hear or See?

Add caption

It’s was getting a lot colder. I may have worn my down parka but I forgot my gloves. Evidently Sadie was in as much of a hurry to get back inside the house as I was.

Really ??? Another Photo?  "Let's Go"

Where was Heidi during all of this? … where smart basset hounds choose to stay in weather like this … in bed covered in blankets sleeping. She never snores.

Nothing planned this afternoon but a couple of NFL Playoff games. I cannot imagine any of these games being more exciting than the one last night in Phoenix Arizona. It will be some coffee at times, and a fresh bowl of Cajun Beans have been made along with some cornbread.

Life is good here in the ‘tropics’ of Southern Indiana.

Blog Disappointment

Author note:  I chose option #3, currently in process at 9:39pm. Around 11:00 pm I was told the ‘installer’ might be stuck because the files were not loaded into the blog. During this 3 hour delay a few people have told me just start this blog from scratch and leave the Blogger blog intact. I put a page with links at the top when I started this blog named “old blog”. So that’s what I’m going to do. Saves a tremendous amount of time.

When you have tendencies of being a perfectionist when putting a blog or website online, early Saturday night I became very disappointed in my new blog on WP. I had been editing old posts that either didn’t have a category or tags. Blogger calls them ‘labels’. What was shocking was finding just how screwed up the format of the transferred post was. I looked at the ‘preview’ and found HUGE amounts of formatting errors, paragraphs ran together, no spacing between photos and paragraphs.

I was somewhat shocked at what I saw. Very unprofessional and a huge disappointment.

Of course if no readers click on a post from last summer or three years ago they wouldn’t see it, so I guess it wouldn’t matter. Yet, I would know the majority of the transferred posts look like crap. Those readers that would find those older posts would also see the same issues.

I doubled checked the posts on my Blogger blog and found there was no consistency in what WP called a category or tag. Sometimes that Blogger ‘label’ was transferred as a WP ‘category’ or ‘tag’, sometimes not at all.

So what are my options:

1. Leave everything the way it is for the older post, even the missing categories
2. Edit only the categories and tags like I started to do and don’t touch the body of the post.
3. DELETE all the posts on WP that was transferred from Blogger – then do the transfer process again.
4. DELETE all the posts on WP that was transferred from Blogger and have the starting point 13 Jan 2016

I really can’t believe it the more I think about it. There should be very few issues transferring from Blogger to WP. I still wonder what damage was done when I inadvertently transferred my Blogger blog a 2nd and 3rd time, that I discussed here a few days ago.

I guess I could find out by selecting option #3.

Any readers that use WP, have you heard of issues such as this when transferring your old blog to WP from Blogger? In the meantime I will start Sunday morning by checking the WP forums.

Feedly Issues

Sadie In The Coachman

Feedly Subscribers: I don’t know why it is doing it, but that feed is treating every post I edit here as a new post on Feedly. I don’t know who I would contact there to fix it.

The problem is I am in process of editing hundreds of old blog posts that transferrer the other day from Blogger. I found by accident that the majority of them didn’t have a category, a tag or both. I have checked my old blog and did see that the posts that I am having to edit did have labels on Blogger. I have completed about 33% of them.

Based on some feedback I received on different things on the blog, I added a little color for the background color. I would give more separation between the white background and the blog.

What happened to the 100 photo slideshow?

A reader mentioned it was using a lot of his data when they failed to turn it off when they visited the site. I knew that if he and I did the same thing, there might be many more that visit here doing it and not realizing it. Not everyone has unlimited data. People like me and others pay for a limited amount of data per month.

In my case I noticed that Chrome Google was using almost 100% more data per day since moving to WP but didn’t realize why. Understand that while I was either working on the blog in the background, uploading photos, even editing all posts … as long as I had my home page open with the slideshow turned on … it was using data.

So you will notice it’s gone and I replaced it with a tiled mosaic of 15 photos.

While I was busy most of the morning working on WP, correcting different categories and tags … the hounds were sleeping. They never asked to go outside. They didn’t play inside, they just slept. Maybe they had a wild night after I went to sleep last night.

I tuned into my college ballgames around 12:30pm, with plans of more work on the blog between the basketball game I watched until the NFL Playoff game started at 4;30pm. I didn’t make it. A siesta sounded better and the hounds agreed.

So … here are the only photos of the hounds taken today. As you see they were as energetic as I was … which wasn’t much. I guess all of us need a rest day sometimes.

I'll try to be a better blogger tomorrow here in the 'tropics' of Southern Indiana.

Some Friday Rants

The photos today will be tied to no specific subject. I’ve picked them at random and it’s possibly a change of pace. All these photos are on the blog for the first time. All comments will be approved.

WP’s comment process is that all first time commenters require my approval. From your 2nd comment on no approval is needed, it’s live when you enter it. ALL photos will enlarge if you click the photo, in any format they are in. If you “hover” your cursor over the photo you can see the caption.

It’s been one of those “Seattle Days” to me this afternoon. It reminds me of the ten years I lived in the Pacific Northwest (PNW) and those winter days would be very similar to what the hounds and I have experienced today here in the ‘tropics’ of Southern Indiana. If you are wondering, it’s like this … 44°, feels like 36° dark overcast clouds with either intermittent rain or a steady light rain, aided by 20mph winds. Felt warmer in Breckenridge Colorado in January with sub-zero temps.

So it was pretty easy to stay inside, forget taking photos of anything outside … and drink coffee. After all that is where I started my coffee habit, while living on Whidbey Island. It took 38 years before I started drinking coffee. The hounds were more than agreeable to the plan of the day. I am too but I need to get out to replenish the kitchen cabinets and refrigerator with food. Otherwise the comment today by the Spotted Dog Ranch may have some merit … Stella and I need a caterer!

So with that in mind, I decided my Friday afternoon post or early evening post for the day would be just a page of rambling, a few photos from the past and a rant or two a few rants thrown in. I mean life is good but there is always something to complain about in today’s world.

All I'll Say Is 1977

Before moving forward I will say the weather outside did nothing different to hounds lifestyle today except cut down on the number of trips they went outside. They had no interest in going outside just to stand in the rain. Smart hounds and I reassured them by repeating to them how good they were.

So Heidi did her normal routine after an early breakfast … grabbed the big living room chair. After scratching the thick Mexican blanket into the perfect pile, she has been sleeping there the rest of the day. A quick trip outside after lunch of course but right back in to the chair.






 Sadie and I played some indoor fetch. The game didn’t last more than 5 minutes before she stretched out for a day of sleep. Stella was the same way, sleep before anything else. No playing, no bone chewing, no whining for food … just indoor sleep, let it rain.

 

 

 

Sadie Goes No Further After Seeing The Rain

 

 

 

I am becoming more acclimated to WordPress. I love it. I have noticed though from what I posted the other night about my likes and dislikes. How stupid can one be to post things like that, only a few days later or the next day … have your answer on how the simplest things work? I see the spellcheck icon at the top of the screen … but I am writing this post from my “dashboard”. I love the dashboard … but there is a different “inside” page somewhere else where you can write new posts, edit them, etc .. that doesn’t have the spellcheck icon.

Inserting photos right now and see from doing from the Dashboard is different than the other pages where I wrote, inserted photos and posted them. Here I can’t there I could put multiple photos in one group.  HELP!!!!! If I am on my blog at .com, clicking the ‘edit’ button gets me to where that different page is, where I can edit photos and group them together.

I finally figured out the photos, how to link them so they explode to a large size when you or I click it. I’ve cleaned up all of the pages listed at the top of the blog, fixing all the photos so they will enlarge when clicked. Winston’s Story alone had over 100 of them to fix.

A Mini Cooper can be an SUV or a Truck bed when hauling 500 pounds is required!

Photo by Owner In Mini Cooper Forum

My 2009 Mini Cooper S at Home Depot

I want to take a time out here for my first rant of this post …………….

Ashley I don’t know who you are. After 19 months of getting MY new Verizon phone number, your friends, your late night texts, your debt, your bill collection calls, your ex boyfriends and those calls offering you ways of just getting out of all of your school loans and PAY NOTHING!!! Still haunt me. You get more phone calls in a day than I get in 3 months or longer.

I love Verizon phone service. I like my new number that is 19 months old … I DON’T LIKE ASHLEY!!!

So back to WordPress or WP as many use. I’ll use WP from now on, it’s techie sounding. Things are going very well with the change in blog platform. I am glad I moved the blog. Do NOT look or expect the long list of blogs that I had on my old blog. Sorry, I tried it with 53 different blog links but after looking at it … it made the new site look cluttered. It does take away the ability for readers to find new bloggers though.

Which would you choose?

Speaking of another rant.

Where else can you work for three years or less for multi-millions of dollars per year. Get fired due to poor performance and land a job within weeks MAKING MORE MONEY??? I want all the pressures that come with the job. Why would it matter, in this profession you will get paid your total contract whether you work or get fired … NFL Head Coach. You can also be a MLB Manager, a NBA coach and but not as fast, a College Head Coach and get the same results. Where do I sign?

The View From My Overpriced Seat At Yankee Stadium 2003

The hounds and I have had a couple of recent offers to head west, lay in the sun and get away from the cold temps, rain and snow. After seeing my friend’s rescued Mastiff rolling on his back in the hot sunshine on a yard of nothing but grass … no weeds, no yard moles … the offers are tempting. Not sure if, when or what will happen.

For new readers, and blog followers … over to the right sidebar on the Archive drop down menu will give you 4 years of posts where you can witness my decision making process or the lack there of.

Politics I will NEVER get into on this blog, nor any discussions about politics will be on this blog. I’ve never liked politics to begin with and this last decade has made me even more cynical. When my long time friend from college mentions it at times in our conversations … he tells me to read “March to Folly” by Margaret Tuchman. It was written around 45 years ago, give or take a couple. My friends says it has all the answers to today’s circus called the world. “Just relax and enjoy all the news” he keeps telling me.

As my profile states, I am a college basketball addict. There will be a weekend full of games, sliding around and in between the NFL Playoffs. I know I need more televisions but ‘remote channel changing’ during commercials of one game can keep me updated. Plus taping two games on the DVR at the same time also helps.

The hounds will sleep nearby through all the games, with dreams that I will have some food occasionally that can be handed to their begging faces. I run a pretty tight ship around here, so they don’t get many handouts from the bowl of people food.

Sorry that this post is jumping all over the place. I could but won’t go back and put it in some sort of sequence. I have to spend all my spare time on this post editing photos before publishing it. You can always just scroll through the photos. :)

A friend and I are 99.9% sure that all of the scratching that Heidi does is not allergy related. Not food related, Not environmentally related. Has it turned into an obsessive habit? Whatever it is it has been driving me nuts at times. I do wonder though, I just changed the ingredients in the Earthborn Grain Free food. This is the first time she has had Turkey as the #1 ingredient. Could be be turkey instead of a habit?

The more I type this in the “dashboard” the better I like it. All I can say is the other screen I’ve been writing my posts in looks like the same screen you use to edit old posts or photos. I’ll think of it eventually. I figured it out. That other place to do posts and photo editing is via my blog site and clicking the edit button … where I am heading now.

I have to ask though … why two different places to do similar jobs?

I need some feedback on the photo slideshow located near the top on the left sidebar. I thought when I installed it you could stop the slideshow, click a photo and have it explode to a big photo, like the ones in the blog posts themselves. Can’t do that. I also thought those light arrows and the pause symbol would only appear when you hovered your mouse over the photo … not so, they are there all the time.

My only other choice is to go from a slideshow to a grid of 100+ photos but that gets back to my issue with cluttered sidebars and something I would like to stay away from on this blog. So send me an email or comment to this post about your thoughts on the photo slideshow of a 100 or so favorite photos.

Next question?  {scanning the room for a raised hand}

Is this it? Is this all I have for today’s afternoon post? I really thought I’d have a lot more ranting going on but I have lost my train of thought. Plus I have to go through some older photos, insert them and edit them ~takes longer than Blogger photos … but they do look nicer.

Now THAT Is Some Snow - Bertha

Ah here’s one … Apple’s Photo Program that replaced iPhoto sucks!!!

I have followed the rules of the Photo program all the time. I have had it since it came out and was shoved down Mac user’s throats a few months later. As I trek through my thousands of photos that were transferred from iPhoto to Photos, a lot times as I look at old photos (like now), they might have a small yellow warning icon .. to let me know “The Referenced File is Missing”. Where did it go? Those photos transferred ok at the time they were  uploaded.

How can that be?? I’ve only transferred my photos a few different times to get rid of that message!! Luckily I kept my iPhoto program on my computer just for ‘special’ occasions like this. So, I do have that referenced file but I’m not sure I am going to transfer it into Apple Photo again. Isn’t the definition of insanity doing the same thing over and over expecting a different result? It says “over and over” not “a few different times”. :)

That is about all for Friday – IF you made it this far, THANKS for reading!

Have a great Friday night – from the ‘tropics’ of Southern Indiana.

It's Important To Read Not To Glance

In this post I am going to insert some photos that have nothing to do with the subject of this post. Instead of the individual photos in a row, I am going to use the option of putting them into a tile. Let me know which type you like. You can still click each photo within and enlarge them.

When I started yesterday I was wanting to convert all my WP categories into WP tags. They were like tags in my Blogger blog, but WP has tags and then categories which can also have sub-categories. It looked simple to do, shouldn’t take to long … but what started with my mistake led into an all day affair in WP.

I followed the prompts after seeing a tool called ‘category and tag converter’. As I clicked that link it sent me a page with a list of blog sites. I GLANCED at what it said at the top but did not READ it carefully. I am not sure why but it has happened most of my life. It’s where you glance at page but you don’t read the page. That cost me a LOT of time yesterday.

I glanced at the page, saw ‘WordPress’ and clicked the link. While thinking it was strange the next page was asking me to upload my blog .xml file … I played along, downloaded my .xml file and then uploaded it like the prompts wanted.

Then … coincidence came into play. While checking to see what happened after that uploaded file, making sure my blog was still there. I clicked on one of my photos on the newest blog post. Trouble was I couldn’t click on the photo … something that did work before the upload I thought. That was the wrong thought.

So now my focus went from the hows and whys of converting categories to tags … to why aren’t the photos enlarging like before. Now I didn’t have the option of even clicking them. I emailed a couple of friends that were online to see if they saw the same thing. They did.

So I did what I always do when I need answers for almost anything. I searched on Google. That search listed a lot the same questions that I had, but most of them were dated years ago. Time consuming reading. I finally decided to log into WP forum and check there. Couldn’t find anything that was exactly what I was having problems with.

By now though I am reading and not glancing at the pages of information.

Long story short. I had an answer from a WP tech rep. In 15 minutes she has checked my blog, corrected one of the photos to enlarge when clicked and sent me a file that showed me exactly what to do. How’s that for service?

Of course that led to more time but I had a lot of time on my hands while the snow melted outside. I’ve been needing something to keep my mind busy this past week or so and moving my blog to WP came at the right time. Although it was time consuming, I love that kind of work. Maybe I should go back to a two year college and formally study web design or learn how to build apps. For the past 10-11 years of doing stuff like that off and on, I’ve always enjoyed it.

So I have her instructions. I am not thrilled with what I have to do to fix those photos but it is the process of inserting photos that I did not notice. What is interesting ALL of the posts transferred from Blogger, each photo enlarged with a click … just like I wanted.

The mistake of uploading my blog back up files and installing them over my blog that was already there … had nothing to do with the photos issue!! All of that was self-imposed errors because I glanced at a page and didn’t read the page.

The WP process of inserting photos into blog posts does not and will not enlarge the photos automatically like Blogger does. I was told this morning by the same WP tech rep they are working on that automatic function.

There are a few extra steps that will have to be taken every post with every photo. It IS very time consuming, say if you have 8 or more photos you want to insert into your blog post and have them enlarge to beautiful photos when your readers click them. Yet, there is a visible difference in the quality of the photos on a WordPress blog compared to my blog on Blogger.

I like having that option even for myself. Click any of the photos below to enlarge them.

So things are fixed. I would like to learn more about how WP works, so today I will READ not GLANCE at the pages I look at.

I have to run, Stella is howling for lunch to be served.

Warm this morning in the ‘tropics’ of Southern Indiana with dark gray clouds to the west bringing temps in the teens by Sunday with snow tonight.

Oh … that process to convert Categories to Tags … Took less than 2 minutes