All the stuff you never knew you needed to know about life in rural France.....and all the stuff the books and magazines won't tell you.

Thursday 15 September 2011

There will be changes.....

Volcano EruptingImage by kahunapulej via Flickr
No...I'm not yet despairing enough to brave the horrors of Wordpress, but Blogger is getting me down.

I'm having trouble with my Costa Rica blog again....the people kind enough to follow it have no idea that the latest post exists as Blogger won't tell them.

I have checked settings until I am blue in the face and I am completely fed up with it all.

Unless anyone can come up with a solution -  forget Blogger, their idea of communication is to deliver self congratulatory posts on how clever they are - I am going to amalgamate the two blogs into this one and try my best to signal the content to avoid people interested in Costa Rica finding themselves in darkest France and people interested in darkest France being stunned by mention of public transport and high speed internet that works.

Oh...and one more thing.

I do get het up about things which don't necessarily fit into either French stuff or Costa Rican stuff and will thus put up a page from time to time, as the boiling point of blood approaches.

It's on the sidebar....under the archives...

Threads in the web.

Blogger is a wonderful idea...

It would be even better if those running it could help the IT autistics among us to cope with its little ways...


Enhanced by Zemanta

19 comments:

  1. Actually, my lovely, I don't find Wordpress to be horrific at all. I switched after Blogger screwed me around and for reasons never explained to me, stopped accepting new blogs based on some spurious allegation of spamming. They brought it back (after a few months, yet) but by then I had switched to WP and have never regretted it. While it has its limitations, it's dead easy and if something goes wrong you can actually contact a person and it will be put to rights.

    ReplyDelete
  2. mrwriteon, 'dead easy' wasn't how WP struck me...but I'll go and look at it again.
    And I had no idea that WP actually had people!
    Thank you very much.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Dear Fly,

    I'm sorry for your Blogger troubles. Those I've known who migrated to Word Press appear pleased and have rarely suffered your level of angst as a result.

    I have thought of migrating myself, but must first clear off this PC to make way for the new computer.

    Best of luck!

    ReplyDelete
  4. e, WP at first glance..and second and third...used words which meant nothing to me....but I think migration is in the air

    ReplyDelete
  5. I consider myself to be quite IT savvy but even I fall at the first hurdle with Blogger. Whenever anything goes wrong I just pray that it's effecting lots of other people. Lots of complaints is usually what motivates the people at Blogger to fix things.

    ReplyDelete
  6. I find WP very limited. In fact, I don't really understand how it works. I thought I had Blogger sussed, with the widgets and all, and when I tried to do similar on WP for my mother's blog I couldn't do anything like it at all.

    So it looks rather empty.

    ReplyDelete
  7. Fly...Do let me know if you do manage the move to WP because I know if you can do it, I can. It can be the latest chapter in our "Numpties" book.

    I am too heartily sick of blogger. I am now able to post this comment because I can see my name on the "choose an identity" list below. BUT I have just been unable to comment on another blog, 5 minutes ago, and I just can't understand why this is happening

    ReplyDelete
  8. Steve, I'm not at all IT savvy...and if it were not for Ayak I'd still be in the IT Stone Age.
    I would just like a system which uses the English language, not gobbledygook phrases which mean nothing to me...or visual icons which are, if anything, worse.

    Sarah, I see what you mean...WP blogs look rather intimidating at times and as for how to put up a template....but I'm going to have a look at it.

    Ayak, I'm going to try it out....so prepare for a very large chapter in the Numpties Guide and a very long silence while I do everything wrong...and redo it wrong again...and scream...and throw a Stone Age rock at the computer...

    Violence...the answer to everything!

    ReplyDelete
  9. Hello Fly,

    I'd just like to say that even those of us that work with IT day in day out are sometimes flummoxed by it as well. Sometimes I'd like to take a hammer to my PC in the office, when it freezes crashes for no apparent reason. Grrr!

    ReplyDelete
  10. Genius Loci, well, that's a comfort...I always start off by thinking I've done something wrong...have to change my attitude to IT and take it on with chair and whip.

    ReplyDelete
  11. I'm still ploughing on with Blogger at the moment, Fly, but I can understand your frustration. I've noticed that my last couple of posts have taken ages to show on other people's blog rolls, even though their new posts pop up instantly on mine. Sigh.... When i'm less busy I may try to fathom out why this is happening.

    As yet I'm not tempted by WordPress, as I dislike the way most WP blogs look so similar. Also it doesn't support LinkedWithin and I find that quite a lot of my page-views come through people following through the links it provides. Statistics aren't everything, but it's nice to know that my older posts may get another airing at times and LinkedWithin enables this better than anything else I know, certainly better than the archive listings.





    As long as I deal with it using Google Chrome, it functions reasonably, but with Internet Explorer i have problems with commenting.

    ReplyDelete
  12. Perpetua, I quite agree with you about the presentational advantages of Blogger over Wordpress, especially LinkedWithin.
    I don't have problems with any programme accessing Blogger but no change of programme changes my problem.

    It has to be said, though that, having had another look at Wordpress today, I do find it intimidating.

    However it is so frustrating to want to share my discoveries about life in a new continent and find it frustrated by a system fault.

    ReplyDelete
  13. Fly, it's just occurred to me that you could think about creating a new Blogger blog about Costa Rica and exporting all your previous posts into it. Having had a look at the Help section, this seems to be a straightforward procedure. You can then delete the old blog completely, to avoid any confusion.

    If the problem is just a bug with this particular blog, it would hopefully be left behind by doing this. i'm guessing you'd have to change the name slightly, as I doubt Blogger would allow two blogs with exactly the same name, but that might be a small price to pay.

    Just a thought....

    ReplyDelete
  14. Perpetua, very practical solution. I'll have a look at that!

    ReplyDelete
  15. Ah, the horrors of blogger and WP...

    Small point but I had regular problems until I realised they were all related to one particular computer rather than the account itself - cookies or something. Anyhow, stopped using that PC, cleaned and debugged it, and no problems since.

    Worth trying to see if the problems persist

    ReplyDelete
  16. Hi Fly – Sorry you’re having to consider going all Flintstones on us, while you pound away in the Wordpress quarry for a bit. Hope it turns out more “Yabbadabbadoo” than “****, **** and ******* !” in the end…whatever happens.

    Having read your post I was about to suggest you consider exporting all your Costa Rica blog contents to a whole new, say - ‘Brides of Costa Rica’ blog template – and then I read Perpetuas second comment, which sum’s it all up perfectly already.

    Many keen blogger bloggers have chosen to go this route in the past, due to a series of pervasive blog glitches and gremlins becoming deeply entrenched on their blogs and thence receiving scant help from the blogger cavalry. Should involve a lot less time spent rock throwing, than carving out a whole new WP blog probably would too.

    I had to change from IE to Google Chrome a few months back, cos it was taking over 90 seconds for each of my blog pages to open up. Chrome cured this problem and more, in an instant, not least because it shares the same generic language as its blogger cousin. I have to say that once I managed to get all my own glitches and wrinkles ironed out, for me and my needs, Blogger now works very well. Famous last words perhaps.

    Although not possible in the past, Link Within does actually now officially integrate as standard with all self hosted Wordpress platform blogs. Just as a general overview, Wordpress tends to be popular with the pro and commercial blogger fraternity, due to the vast number of professional plug ins, visual themes, gadgets and other third party applications that are available to it from elsewhere on the web. Yahoo and the New York Times blogs are both hosted by WP for this reason, to name but a few of the majors.

    In other words, if you’re the happy bloggy webby techie type, you will be able to build a world class looking blogsite, but if you’re not, then the gains may not be entirely as you’d hoped. Blogger’s inter social blog writer community is still the biggest and most popular by a country mile, and just about everything you’ll ever need is free of charge to use, unlike WP.

    Interesting article 'link here'.

    ReplyDelete
  17. Yes, blogger is a pain. I find that googling the problem sometimes helps. I don't think wordpress is much better, unfortunately. My other blog is hosted on my own domain, but then that has the disadvantage that it doesn't link easily with other blogs.... can't win....

    ReplyDelete
  18. adopt a geek....

    they are usually helpful at times like these

    ReplyDelete
  19. Mark, as I always think it is me I cleared down the computer but still have the problem.

    Bish Bosh Bash, WP has reduced me to drooling in corners...I cannot handle it.
    So I'll go down the new blog road and try to import the old one....thanks to you and Perpetua for the suggestion.

    Jenny Woolf, I've never really liked the WP 'look'...not being in the media community, I suppose....and my attempts with it have not, shall we say, been happy.
    In general, I wish there was a handbook available for these things!

    John Gray, do you have a geek available for adoption?
    Mine is in Belgium and has unfortunately just discovered girls....

    ReplyDelete