Aw Diddums

It used to be possible to obtain commercial videos (such as Jurassic Park or You’ve Got Mail) which included closed captioning. A couple of times when looking at old videos on eBay, I wasn’t sure whether or not they were captioned, and wrote to the sellers to ask if they were. They were confused – they had no idea that any of their videotapes had this ability.

To start with there was a little box thingy (a decoder) which cost £100 (around the time I discovered it) and could be run with an ordinary VCR to decode the closed captioning on Jurassic Park, You’ve Got Mail and others of that ilk. Eventually they stopped making and supporting the little decoder (that’s what I was told when mine broke down). By this time it was possible to obtain VCRs with the decoders built in. Not all VCRs; just some. You had to be careful which you bought.

The Panasonic VCR I have here in this room can read closed captioning. My sister took my old (very expensive) Grundig VCR along with the little decoding box (which appears to work for her).

My mother’s ancient VCR could never read closed captioning as it was too old, so she threw it out about a year ago and bought a DVD/VCR combi. We can watch subtitled DVDs on this, of course, but for some reason (we’re normally so careful when choosing new technology!) it came as a shock when I tried to watch a captioned video on it, and discovered it couldn’t decode the captions. In other words, it’s a normal bog-standard VCR.

I couldn’t understand this… one half of the machine is a DVD player with the capability of reading captions, and the other half of the machine is a VCR without. That makes it 100% useful for the hearing, and only 50% useful for the deaf. If you’re not going to build a decoder into the VCR, what’s the point of having any part of this machine decoding subtitles? That facility is probably only used by a small percentage of the hearing. You might say it’s too clever for some and not clever enough for others.

I said to Mum maybe we should get rid of that one and look for a combi I would find 100% useful… so tonight I looked in the Argos catalogue, and on Amazon, and on other sites. I drew a complete blank. It might just be that they fail to mention it in the marketing information, but as far as I can make out, none of the new VCRs (in the UK) have decoders.

I’ve seen hints that old videos don’t play well on new VCRs anyway… I saw a complaint by an Amazon customer who said old videos played badly on his new machine but beautifully on his old machine. The manufacturers told him he had no business playing old videotapes on their shiny new VCRs anyway.

We are all expected to change eventually… videos are out on their ear. But it incenses me that though hearing people still have the option of purchasing new machines to play their old videos (even if rather badly, it seems), the deaf no longer have that option at all.

I’ve been looking at watermarking my images. I studied one site that looked interesting, but probably isn’t worth it for a cash-strapped amateur. The watermarking plugin was ‘free’, which seemed strange… I wasn’t altogether surprised to find (on reading the terms) that it only works if you take out the subscription.

So… NOT free. Not particularly direct either… verbal tricks of that sort make me think twice about buying.

I can make my own little watermarks without paying anyone, but do they work as well? No little box would pop up with the artist’s information. The surest way of protecting work is not to put it on the internet, but where’s the fun in that?

Meanwhile I just sign things with a URL where I can be found (mental note, must not abandon my ID on these sites), and my most favourite pictures aren’t going anywhere… they rest at home with me.

The arty sites have a plethora of contests, just for fun, and I’ve been finding them a source of inspiration. I’ve only entered one so far, but got an honourable mention. I’ve been working with others in view, and it’s had the effect of making me even more prolific but not actually posting anything… just in case I post something I could have put in one of these small contests. Most of them say “only new images please.”

I’m usually reasonably pleased with the pictures I turn out, but something unsettling has occurred. The last four pictures I made… I didn’t just like them; I loved them. I was using techniques I avoided before (drawing and painting) and didn’t set out meaning to; it just happened. Even stranger, I only wanted to make one of them, and that was in the nature of a quickie (to try out a Photoshop tutorial).

A short aside: I have a bit of a mental block when it comes to talking about this particular hobby. I don’t like saying ‘my art’ or ‘my artwork’ as it sounds so pompous, and usually alternate between ‘my pictures’ and ‘my images’… but that gets old quite fast. Another mental block I have is when it comes to digital stuff, I can never say “I painted” or “I drew,” as I see those being for traditional media only (real pencils, paints, paper). I know that ‘painting’ and ‘drawing’ are accepted terms in digital media too… isn’t drawing with a mouse or a tablet pen just as much a physical process as drawing with a pencil? And it’s not even as precise, half the time. Still, I avoid it, as I know if I said “I painted a picture today,” most people would assume I’d had the watercolours out.

That leaves me with the problem of how to describe the process… “I made something, created something, did something?” Icky. Overtones of school and Blue Peter.

About the four pictures I made that I liked more than I expected to… I was fairly sure none of them would work, and if they did, it would take some hard slogging to make anything of them; wouldn’t it be easier to make a vector picture with gradients and layer styles? I was in two minds about trying these projects at all. Even worse, I disliked the raw material I started out with… two ugly fractals, an artificial vector flower (made by myself in Paintshop Pro), an untidy Photoshop brush (still be to superceded… deliberately spelling that with a ‘c’…) and a shaky drawing with the small El Cheapo tablet dating from the Year 2000 which I recently dug out from a plastic bag. (It doesn’t go with Mac System X, so I had to put it on the PC… and even then the installation was a bit iffy).

The tablet is supposed to make drawing easier, but my first effort was messy and not worth a second look. I thought “never mind, I’ll send it across to the Mac so the little white Mac-mouse can clean it up.” That’s not what the tablet is for… but the shaky drawing is now in one of my Golden Four pictures.

The thing is, you often hear people say (usually of photos) that if it was bad to start with, you can’t make it good. I disagree. You could take the worst photo in the world and turn it into a thing of beauty, though it probably wouldn’t be a photo any more.

To start with, it’s all I can do to keep on with these tough projects, but as time goes by and I see signs that something good is emerging, a sense of wonder creeps in… and you couldn’t drag me away.

This might not seem to be connected, but we were watching Stargate after missing the beginning. It was about an alien city in a dome; the citizens were linked to a main computer and were being brainwashed. People were being killed to keep the population small and manageable, and the survivors’ memories were altered so that they wouldn’t notice their fellows had vanished. I was convinced the Council (or some higher body) were the villains, but they were as much victims as anybody. At the end, I said to Mum, “who was doing it?”
“The computer,” said Mum, squinting strangely at me.
“I just thought… someone must have programmed it to do those things?”
“It was the computer. It got into their minds, like it’s got into yours, and makes them all unseeing and unheeding…”

So, the computer’s the villain. Such a weaver of fantastic worlds and things that don’t exist… even pictures that aren’t on paper. Though, the other day, someone I was talking to said it wasn’t till she had one of her fractals professionally printed and held it in her hands that she realized it was real.

Sometimes I wonder what will happen when I die… will all these pictures, including the Golden Four, be zapped? My diaries burned, disks shredded, words lost? My whole life on computer, deleted.

Mum says she doesn’t care what happens after she dies. The whole planet could blow up; it wouldn’t make any difference to her. But it matters to me. Apart from caring what happens to cats, trees, and dolphins, I want to feel I’ve left some kind of mark. If the planet implodes, so do my pictures. Maybe I will be the only person (apart from Mum and the Computer) to have seen them.

It’s funny how the subconscious mind operates. The other night I dreamed a young student was procrastinating by churning out fractals and Apophysis scripts instead of studying for his exams. His study topics included fractals but he was wasting time on fractal art instead. He even wrote a little poem which he put on his site… and this is it, word for word, not a woolly half-memory of a fading dream:

The breaks are in the wrong places but it has exactly 17 syllables… like a haiku. Yes, I suppose the computer has got into my mind.

Normally, around this time of year, I’m muttering about crowded cafés, shops, streets and roads. Not so much this year! For a couple of weeks now I’ve been smiling happily, feeling warm and giving… I suspect it has something to do with the art sites I frequent. When people are being people around you, having their quirks, weaknesses, concerns and their strengths (largely the creative process, or at least the desire to do well at it) – it gives you a warm and fuzzy feeling!

When folk come along and add your work to their favourites, that doesn’t hurt either… all sorts of people, from teenage girls to 65 year-old guys in Finland. You have something in common with them and so you’re no longer thinking (for example) that older people play Bridge rather than get on the net, or that younger people are an alien species who lurk on street corners. When I was 16, if I’d known other 16 year-olds who were keen to share their passion for drawing, painting or photography with me, I’d have been delighted. Who knows what difference the internet would have made to me at that age?

Getting back to my recent resurgence of love and goodwill to all humankind, a possible factor is that phenomenon I mentioned in an earlier blog post: when I don’t do something very much, I glide through it with ease. If I was going to town every other day, I’d be a lot grumpier than I am now.

A couple of days ago, Mum asked me why I was grinning. I told her I got a new comment on my ‘introvert bloggers’ post and was thinking about how disastrous it would be if the internet collapsed all of a sudden. “Imagine life without it,” I said.

“Aiee!” said Mum, then (after a pause), “introverts have a warped view of life.”

Pushing away the niggling thought that I have a tendency to ‘think’ myself into tight corners, I said “but you’re an introvert yourself.”
“Yes – I’m an introvert.”
“Though you have lots of friends and sit on all those committees.”
“When I was your age, I wouldn’t have been able to give speeches and talks, but it’s not so bad now. Anyway, we can’t let idiots run everything.”
“By idiots… do you mean extroverts?”
“Er… more or less. There’s usually a balance.”
“Extroverts go out and do stuff without thinking, while introverts think about things so much they don’t want to do them?”
“Something like that.”

Hmm…

A stray memory surfaced in my mind just now. I was working on a large poster with a friend in art class at school. It was beginning to grate on me that she was so bossy; she would say “do this” and we did it all her way, though I was a better artist. I found I was scared to touch the picture without permission. Further back in this post I was complaining that I couldn’t share the fun of artwork with friends (apart from the odd scribble with felt tip pens), but what was going on here was not sharing.

One day I decided it was my picture too, and I was jolly well going to put some dots in. Of course they looked terrible, and if I’d been in my right senses I would never have bothered with them. When my friend saw them, she got very cross and painted all the dots out again, and I didn’t object. She was completely unaware, I think, that I hadn’t put the dots in because I wanted dots… I’d put them in to assert myself a little.

This is doubtless one good reason why introverts and extroverts don’t always work well together. If someone you know at work or school is acting mulishly, throwing senseless spanners in the works, it’s possible that something similar is going on. If you don’t want me to break out in a rash of dots, don’t boss me. (Ahem).

Today I was alarmed to discover that one of my older posts on WordPress had a list of four links at the foot of it. The list was headed ‘possibly related posts’. The first link was to one of my own posts; the other three was to posts by blogs I didn’t even know. I saw it as a type of advertising spam, and I didn’t want it.

Investigating, I found that some bloggers were reporting a rise in the number of trolls visiting their blogs, as well as bloggers whose views were radically opposed to their own. Some of the links led to inappropriate sites, and there was nothing to point to the fact that the poster wasn’t endorsing these places. A quick look in my stats showed that I was receiving referrals from sites I didn’t think had any interest in my blog… turns out they had my posts in their ‘possibly related links’.

The good news is that I could opt out – and I did. I wish I’d known earlier it was happening, as I wasn’t seeing any of those links at the foot of recent posts. I won’t be receiving any of the traffic generated by this exercise, but I was happy enough the way I was before.

Meanwhile, the latest ScribeFire update still wasn’t working for me; in particular I was getting login errors when I tried to reconnect it with my blog… so I downgraded to the version I was happy with. It’s like going home.

PS It’s one of those days (in a minor way) when one thing going wrong leads you straight into another thing going wrong…

ScribeFire had a fresh update which at first seemed OK, then it started telling me it couldn’t or wouldn’t delete my notes. I wasn’t sure what was up with that, but it didn’t seem too terrible, so I left it. Doubtless it would be sorted in the next update.

I typed out a fresh post which it allowed me to save only once, but that wasn’t a disaster either, as it wasn’t forgetting anything I typed into it.

“B-b-b-but I’m addicted to hitting ’save’!” I grumbled, feeling lost. That seems a weird objection, but it’s true. Saving every little change is as routine as making coffee. Hunting for the save button and not finding it makes me hesitate. In fact I nearly hit the ‘Clear Content’ button instead, as it was over in that corner.

Later on (after I turned off the computer so a guy could bring Sky to my delighted old analogue TV), I tried to post something, but discovered Scribefire had forgotten where my blog was. I clicked around, looking to see if there was a list of blogs from which Aw Diddums had accidentally been deselected, but couldn’t see anything, so started to remind it via the ‘launch wizard’. I got as far as being asked for my password and was spooked enough to cancel without answering. It didn’t make sense that it had forgotten the first time; I would rather wait it out. My imagination was running riot again, with the squeaky little voice whispering “it could be a haaaaaaaacker!!” Aw shush.

Gradually it occurred to me there was nothing stopping me from using my own blog’s dashboard, so I toddled over there, pasted my blog post, and looked at the list of categories. I read it over three or four times before realizing (panicking) that Agoraphobia wasn’t there. Had some haaaaacker been tinkering with my blog?

THEN I noticed the small print beside the list of categories. It said, ‘Most Used’. Underneath that was a link to ‘All Categories’. OH!

When you’re not expecting to be presented with an abridged list, it wastes your time while you scroll up and down looking for the thing that isn’t there. Agoraphobia should have been right at the top, alphabetically… it would have suited me to have the whole list there. I notice this time it’s still on the ‘All Categories’ tab – probably ‘Most Used’ is the default when you’ve not been on the site for a while, or when you’ve been doing most of your posting via ScribeFire. I hope ScribeFire feels better soon. It’s gone a little bit haywire and I miss it.

Mum was tempted by an offer of four trial months of free Sky TV (after £75 initial set-up, delivery of Sky box and installation of mini-dish). So now we have a dish on our house too.

It’s been enjoyable so far, though it’s shocking how little is subtitled, including programmes which are subtitled sometimes, and other times not. They must do something about that, as it seems such a waste of energy and resources.

We have seen The Colour of Magic amongst other things, very good.

A few days after the Sky box was installed, we tried to watch a DVD. Nothing happened… I suspected the DVD was playing but not showing up on the TV screen. I crawled behind the TV and changed the Scart cables around – the Sky guy had placed them so that they both ran from the TV. I put the DVD player in the middle, taking both cables so that the TV had one and the Sky box had the other.

The DVD sprang to life on the TV screen (already part of the way through).

After watching the film, we tried to watch Sky again, and this time Sky wasn’t responding. Again I crawled behind the TV and switched the cables round to Plan C… this time I discovered that it mattered which Scart socket you used! I thought it didn’t matter, but it does. The Sky box has one socket for the TV and another for the video or DVD player, so this time I put the Sky box in the middle, with one cable running to the TV and the other to the DVD player. The sockets on the other units matter as well, but I swapped the Scarts round till I figured out which ones worked.

This time we could watch Sky, and we could also watch a DVD if we switched off the Sky box first. But the Sky picture was green!!

“You’ve lost all the red,” said Mum, accusingly. After a little head-scratching, I crawled behind the TV again and discovered that one of the Scart cables wasn’t as well pushed in as I thought; pushing it all the way in was all that was needed to restore ‘normal’ colour to the TV screen…

We now have a TV set-up we can continue to use.

The excitement wasn’t entirely over, as Mum got a letter saying they were going to start debiting her account at the end of the month… she phoned and said she’s barely even started the four-month trial period she was promised, and they said they accidentally sent out letters saying they would, but they weren’t going to, and Mum’s money is safe for now.

Funny how it’s never easy.

One of my biggest pieces of news is something I keep forgetting to mention – there are tenants in my house.

They’ve been there quite a while already. So far things are going smoothly, except that my washing machine chose to break down the first time they used it. I felt like walking over there especially to kick it. I said to Mum I had visions of them pulling the washing machine out to change it and discovering crumbs and rotting food under it or down the side… the usual places you can’t clean. She said “but we washed the floor when we pulled the machine out to straighten the lino.”

Oh… we did? Well that was lucky, then. I hope it wasn’t us straightening the lino that busted it, but I suppose it doesn’t make a lot of difference, as it was me that paid for the new one anyway.

I think it’s much more likely it was failing already; sitting unused for several months may have caused something inside to dry up, shrink, crack, and give up completely. Or maybe it couldn’t stand the thought of never seeing me again, and committed hari kiri.

At one point we drove past the street my house is in… if you crane to see down to the far end, you can see it as you flash past. I felt nervous and didn’t even know why; it was that ‘gearing myself up for disagreement/rejection’ feeling; the knowledge they would want to arrange things differently. And why not? I wanted everything different from the way the previous occupant had it, and I don’t think it worried her that we planned, in her hearing, to install a new kitchen and a Ramsay ladder – she just grinned and nodded encouragingly.

All I was doing was obtaining a quick glimpse of my house in the distance, and my stomach was churning.

The blinds were pulled up out of sight, windows welcoming in the sunshine. When I lived there, I had the blinds down and slanted, partly to keep myself from being dazzled, and partly so people couldn’t see me quite so readily. It’s a quiet street, but not that quiet.

“They don’t like the colour of my blinds,” I moaned, and drooped.
Mum said, “don’t look. I never looked when we rented out the house in Aberdeen. Grandpa said once when we were in the area, “let’s drive past your house!” but I said no. He couldn’t understand why not; I said it was because I didn’t want to see it.”

“It’s not our home right now,” I nodded – “it’s other people’s.”
“Exactly.”

Much better not to look… I get paranoid enough about ridiculous things without also fretting about whether or not they like my blinds.

Before they even moved in, they asked if they could install a satellite dish. I had been expecting the question and promptly said yes. I didn’t want one on the house (it’s so small that a dish would probably cause it to keel over), but my elderly neighbour recently died, and the very next thing that happened was someone clapping a dish on her house. I knew then that my own house was a marked building. If tenant after tenant asked that question till I cracked, I might just as well allow the first tenants to have it. Maybe they’ll stay longer…

If they can afford Sky, I’m guessing they’ll have their own TV with them. They won’t want Mum’s ancient analogue TV with the tiny Pace Freeview box connected to it with a piece of sticking plaster. (No, it isn’t really, and I’m not saying it’s dangerous; we’ve just had a safety inspector checking everything… my meaning is that the TV was old enough not to have a Scart socket. No, I mean, it was so old it didn’t have a Scart socket. Sorry, it’s late and I’m rambling).

Anyway, I don’t blame them for a minute; I would be squeezing it into a cupboard too if I had my own TV with me.

It’s midnight, Mum’s gone to bed and there was a loud clatter… I jumped and turned my head, and there was Samson the kitten, sitting with his paw on the TV’s remote control. He had apparently knocked it off its perch and was staring at it intently, ears pricked.

“Ah,” I said, “you gave me a fright! Why do you always make loud noises at this time of night?”

Samson gave me a disappointed look and I couldn’t help smiling.
He squawked.
“Of course I love you,” I said.
He squawked again and then scratched his chin defiantly, as though to say “well OK, but sometimes it’s hard to tell.”

Maybe he didn’t say any of that…. it could be that he wants Sky TV too.

Today I was catching up on my blog-reading (slipped a bit) and found a post I enjoyed by Liz in Fate is Chance, Destiny is Choice: Inclusion.

I know exactly where she’s coming from when she speaks of the feeling of panic you get when everybody in the classroom starts a mad scramble, and you don’t know what is going on because you didn’t hear the statements that led up to that moment. Gosh, that brings it all back! I didn’t have any notetakers and wouldn’t even have thought of it. To catch up, I read books, and they were as often my family’s choice of books as the school’s, so maybe I knew things the others didn’t, and vice versa. I was always a little ‘not fond’ of school, and I’m sure uncertainty was the main reason why.

Malfunctioning subtitling equipment, gosh, yes. I haven’t tried the ones in cinemas, but the ones in TV are malfunctioning all the time; or the TVs and receivers garble the subtitles/captions for whatever reason. Someone like me isn’t able to pinpoint why, and even if the experts knew why, they won’t be in a hurry to explain it to their customers – they don’t want us interfering or making ‘unreasonable’ demands. That sounds paranoid, I know, but that comes from general life experience and observation! There is so little out there that’s subtitled… for reasons of cost and hassle, apparently. I like to think folk are doing their best to change this situation, and I’m sure some are, but I can’t help suspecting that other people don’t care, and yet others are more interested in an easy life and profits.

I’ve always felt that film editors should consider this a little more (if allowed by the management)… you know how some pictures are very fast moving… take a look at Disney’s Hercules as an example. It’s almost impossible to watch the film AND read the subtitles. In extreme examples I have resorted to rewinding DVDs and videos in an effort to catch something that whipped past. I’m a fast reader; I have learned to absorb chunks of subtitling in the blink of an eye, as in the next instant it could be gone… but sometimes I’m just not fast enough. I’m pretty sure speedy filming makes life harder for the subtitler as well as for the subtitle-reader. The subtitler’s mission is to place as much meaning as possible in a small space and increasingly small amounts of time. My point is that film editing could be more inclusive but isn’t much considered, if at all. Does film need to zip past quite as fast? Why? Quite often the commercials are slower and better subtitled than the movie we have just barged through.

That’s all I want to say for the time being; I think I’ll get a soothing mug of coffee now!

Been a touch distracted; I’m not even carrying on with copying the old posts across from the old site at the moment. I hope to catch up with everyone’s blogs and comments ASAP.

I was playing with layer styles and vectors… I can’t work with vectors in Photoshop Elements, huff! But I can in Paintshop Pro, bless its brightly coloured cotton socks. I’m not able to make Photoshop brushes using vectors with Photoshop Elements 2.0 alone (I’ve no idea if the more recent versions are better… I heard a hint they were even more cut down, at least in some areas), but with both the computers working on it, I can.

It’s obvious the struggle my old PC has compared to the newer Mac, though. Lots of huffing and puffing. I’m not angry with it, just sorry. It’s been a valiant wee machine.

This isn’t very good, just being an experiment… but do you recognize the bear?
I should be cleaning out the cat tray…

Last night Mum put a ‘ready meal’ in the microwave oven. When I came downstairs I found she had left the kitchen, and the microwave was flashing the following message at me: “O.P.E.N. D.O.O.R. O.P.E.N. D.O.O.R. O.P.E.N. D.O.O.R.”

I opened the door, took the cooked dish out, and put it on the chopping board.

Mum came through and looked around, surprised. “Did YOU put that there?” pointing at the dish.
“Yes,” I said.
“Is it cooked?” she asked, frowning as though she couldn’t quite remember.
“Yes – the oven said to open the door, so I obeyed.”
“Oh.”

She put a second dish in the microwave, started it, then said, “Hmm. I could leave little notes round the house telling you to do things.”
“Notes only work if they flash,” I said.

Life is Like Wading Through Treacle

My cr£dit card company have begun the annoying practice of putting the following sticker on my replacement card: “please call this number to confirm that you have received this.”

I’m deaf – I can’t call that number.

I asked my sister if she was getting that sticker on her cards as well, and she said she was in such a mood about hers that she marched into her bank branch and asked a member of staff there to do the ringing up. I thought that was a good idea, which was why I was waiting in a bank queue yesterday. I asked if I really had to ring that number, or if I could safely ignore it, but she said “do you want me to ring for you?” and I said “yes please.”

It took a bit longer than we expected… she managed to get through when she rang the number, but the people at the other end wouldn’t believe her, and refused the request to confirm my card. Fortunately she had an ace up her sleeve in the form of a private number, so she rang that, and this time it was accepted. Presumably they knew who she was on that phone.

The bank clerk agreed it was all terribly difficult, and when we were talking about it later, Mum said, “it’s so unnecessary.” I said if they didn’t believe she was who she said she was, how would they have believed me? Presumably they’re not allowed to ask me my pin. How would they know who I was?

All these questions. What I really wanted, I suppose, was some indication that calling was optional. (Ha). Or a little slip to fill in and send off. I thought they used to do that. What happened to that plan?

The thought of having to go through this every time a replacement card arrives makes me tired. I wonder if switching to another cr£dit card would be a smart move… or do they all pull that trick?

I have been making a mistake! There I was imagining you had to use quotation marks in searches if you were hunting for a phrase such as “I wandered lonely as a cloud” and didn’t want to end up with results such as “I suspect the dog wandered away yesterday because Jenny sounded lonely when I talked to her on the phone. I decided to go home just as a cloud came over.”

I tested it on my short blog post Rugs Do Not Discriminate. First of all I did a search for “When I trip over the rugs in the kitchen and squawk” including the quotation marks, and the only result I got was the WordPress category tag accidents in the home. My rug post is listed there, but it’s also listed under other tags: accidents, hearing others, kitchen mats, listening to others, rugs, tripping (yes, I know that last tag is more about magic mushrooms. Tough). None of those are listed in Google when you search for my rug post. Not that I was particularly interested in seeing them there, as I prefer to see a direct link to it.

Well, I was wondering just what had happened, then discovered by accident that if I made the same search in Google without the quotation marks, my post showed up at the top of the page – which it should, seeing as I was using a direct quotation! Another search using single quotation marks had the same result – showing my blog post at the top of the page. Ah. At some point it seems I got confused and started using “these marks” instead of ‘these ones’.

Talking about the WordPress tags, I realized the other day that the older blog posts I’m moving onto the new blog are not appearing properly in Google. When I thought about it, I realized it was because I have so many brand new posts on my feed that none of the posts with older dates are showing up on it. When they don’t get on the feed, they don’t show up in Google as individual posts… though they might turn up as part of a WordPress category. For instance if you were to search for ‘painting my territory’ diddums (it’s hard to find if you don’t put the ‘diddums’ in!) you would get a result for the WordPress tag lost in thought instead of a link to the actual blog post, Painting My Territory.

I only realized it when I looked in my blog stats and discovered some of the search terms were leading the unfortunate searchers straight to categories and tags, not to individual blog posts. I don’t think that’s such a brilliant idea, but on the other hand, it seems to be my only option for the older posts.

Just musing out loud… and it keeps it in my brain so that I don’t keep twittering to myself “but WHY isn’t it showing up on Google?? Oh wait, I already worked out why not…”

Edit 7 March 2008: 

Now I’m not so sure I WAS making a mistake when I searched with double quotation marks instead of single. There’s something else going on here.

I never had any intention of using a blog editor, but last night I found myself sitting here looking at the Firefox extension ScribeFire. I used it to post my last two entries.

I’m not entirely sure why I downloaded it… I think I was scared by stern warnings from WordPress Help not to copy and paste text from wordprocessing software (actually I type my posts into my Eudora email application and copy them from there, and have had no obvious problems doing them that way). It also resulted from following a bunch of links by people saying “get yourself a blog editor! You’ll never look back!”

I wasted ages searching for the WordPress API URL. There seemed to be hundreds of people hunting round for it in increasing desperation, and just as many smug people who had it and weren’t talking about how they got it. It was so frustrating when people asked “what is the API URL?” and somebody else said “don’t ask here, go away!” or “why don’t you have a look at (some place we’d already checked)“… and sometimes the person who had asked would get back and say “oh, it’s OK, I’ve got it!” and not say WHAT they had got or where from. At one point I read something that made me think I had been misled, and people posting to WordPress.com blogs couldn’t use third party blog editors. I nearly gave up.

I only found the relevant page in WordPress.com FAQ by searching for XML-RPC. The title of the help article is XML-RPC and Desktop Apps – no mention of ‘blog editors’, ‘ScribeFire’ or ‘API URL’. Half an hour before, I hadn’t heard of XML-RPC, and ‘end point’ didn’t mean anything to me at all. It turned out that the stern warning about not using Word linked to it as ‘desktop clients’, but if you happen to miss this, which I did, searching for ‘API URL’ turns up nothing of consequence.

I’m not sure yet if ScribeFire is worth my while. It’s pleasanter to use than hamming around in Eudora, and it seems I can do things in different fonts and font sizes without having to insert the code myself. It’s possible to save the blog posts as ‘notes’, but I’m not sure how many I could keep… and I don’t really want to keep them there. I want to store them in a nice solid wordprocessing application, nicely laid out.

Other concerns:

• categories are added but not tags, so I have to go to my site anyway to add them
• there is no ‘link break’ button, so if I change my mind about a link, I have to delete the code myself
• I can’t use special characters such as the en-rule
• I can’t specify timestamps in the past or future, although I can post entries as drafts
• the ‘notes’ in Scribefire do not save the date and time the post was published, and that has to be searched out and added separately to any other copies I’m keeping
• I found an ‘enable pings’ checkbox (unchecked) which unnerved me, thinking maybe my last two live posts didn’t ping the directories (though who cares about those posts?)

Because I want to keep the blog posts in AppleWorks or Eudora, I tend to copy them there anyway. Using ScribeFire is no quicker or less bulky than my original method. On the other hand, I can put the links, bullets and other formatting straight in, and copy my post across as a draft. I can also add and position my images, and (unless something goes wrong) they will be copied to WordPress when I hit ‘publish’. I will still have to add their descriptions separately.

Time will tell.

I didn’t meet up with a lot of success when I was looking into automatically exporting my blog from Blogigo to WordPress… I’m still importing it manually, post by post. I’m copying each old post into the ‘New Post’ box and setting the date to match the original Blogigo date (minus one hour, as Blogigo always seemed to be one hour ahead of me. I remember that made NaBloPoMo 2006 a little more challenging, as I had to post before 23:00 instead of 24:00)!

In transferring my blog, I’ve still only got as far as June 2006! Two or three posts every other day.

I’m unable to transfer the old comments across as actual comments, so if I like any enough to keep, I have to copy them in at the foot of the post.

When I looked into doing the whole thing automatically, I found that we needed an exporter at the original host (Blogigo doesn’t appear to have any). If we don’t have that, it can be done by RSS feed. I’m not sure how that works, but as luck would have it, the RSS feeds at Blogigo have either moved (without telling us) or have been taken down or damaged in some fashion. The RSS feed for my Blogigo blog is now just a blank page with an error message.

I was using Bloglines to subscribe to various Blogigo blogs, keeping an eye on what was being said there. Of course they were mute for quite a long time; after a while Bloglines quietly deleted all of those Blogigo feeds, which were showing no sign of being repaired. (If my feed disappeared similarly from someone else’s list, it was probably never noticed). We don’t have RSS feeds on Blogigo any more, and that’s what drove me away. What’s the point of talking if nobody knows I’ve said something?

WordPress has help forums – I found an enquiry by someone coming from Blogigo (WP blog since deleted), but it doesn’t suggest anything new. I didn’t even try the RSS Feed method – just started bringing the old posts across by hand. I delete each post from Blogigo after it’s copied, unless I happen to remember that it’s linked to from someone else’s site, in which case I leave it up with a message saying I’ve moved.

It’s interesting, in a way – I’ve deleted so many posts that I don’t want up there any more, and it’s a good time to check all my links are still working!