BLOGGING WOES, AND FIBRE BROADBAND
Blogging woes
My blog has been down for a few days while I have attempted to rebuild it.
I recently had an email from Bluehost, the WordPress web host, informing me of a change in their rules. It seems that one can no longer have unlimited storage space for media unless one goes Pro, and they warned me that I was likely to fall into this category as I upload a lot of photos. I therefore signed up for the Pro contract and assumed everything would just go on as normal.
How wrong I was.
My blog disappeared. All I got was a “critical error” message. I spent most of one day on a Bluehost chat trying to sort it out. They informed me that the blog design plugin (Themify) was causing the problem, and I should contact the vendor. I attempted to do this but could find no record of my account details, so I sent them a message and they said that I needed to start another account.
Meantime, after the first chat session, Bluehost got rid of the offending problem and my blog was up again, but it was completely plain without any of the customisations I had made. I had done all these when I first started the blog several years ago and I really couldn’t remember everything I’d done, so I knew there would be a huge amount of work getting it all back again. As soon as I started, the blog went down again, so I was back on the chat, and they were able to sort it out once more, so any of the work I had managed to do also disappeared.
I deleted all the old Themify stuff and installed Themify Ultra. I wrestled with this for a couple of days and despite what they said about their “Builder” being intuitive and user-friendly (you could apparently create a beautiful web design without knowing any code etc.), I couldn’t get the wretched thing to work at all – part of the problem was that I am unfamiliar with the terminology and the numerous websites, tutorials, YouTube videos, and Themify’s own site, that I visited, really couldn’t help me, and the whole thing was doing my head in.
Eventually I ditched Ultra, and downloaded their free Basic version, which was a lot easier to get my head around.
The main problem was the blog header. In the past, I had my own design, and underneath was laid out the menu with all the clickable links to the various pages (e.g. “About Shoshi,” “Contact Shoshi” etc.). This time, I was unable to do this, as the menu insisted on situating itself in the header itself. I made several re-designs of my header which seemed to work OK during the editing phase, but as soon as I attempted to view the post or page, the header was all over the place and everything ceased to be lined up as I wanted.
Eventually I got it sorted by redesigning the header yet again in my photo editor, leaving enough space below my text for the menu items to appear.
The blog is now reasonably presentable and usable but it is not as it was; the whole thing looks clunky to me and still needs quite a bit of work. I need to make sure all the links work (I know there are some that do not), and for some reason the behind-the scenes page where all my posts are listed, is a complete mess – all the columns are really narrow so that words are split onto several lines,which looks awful and is really difficult to read. It still works but it’s horrible and I really haven’t a clue what to do about it.
The headings in the posts don’t look right and I need to do a lot more fine tuning to get it more or less how it was, if that is possible. I have never found WordPress to be very user-friendly when setting things up – there is a lot of assumed knowledge which I don’t have, and when you go on various sites for instructions they say “do this” or “change this thing” and you don’t know what the words mean, or how to actually do it! Also, none of their pictures or interfaces look like mine, and they have buttons to click which don’t exist on mine, and so on. Really, really frustrating.
The thumbnail photo that used to be at the top of each post has now ended up full-size, which I really don’t want, and I can’t find any way to change this back to how it was. There may be things I’m just going to have to learn to live with.
One good thing was that they have a setting which puts up a message in place of the regular blog, informing visitors that a new blog is on its way. This way you can work on it behind the scenes without all and sundry seeing what a mess you are making of everything! At least the somewhat reduced mess I have now ended up with is reasonably acceptable, and I hope in time to do the necessary refinements to make it more aesthetically pleasing.
When I got Ultra, I had in mind to add all sorts of fancy bells and whistles to give my blog more impact but forget it… it’s completely beyond me! I shall now be satisfied if I can at least get it back to some sort of semblance of how it was before, which was working for me just fine.
This is all very frustrating, especially as I have had to spend extra money just to get it back online and running again. I would have expected it to be better as a result of spending more, not worse.
High-speed fibre broadband
Over the past few weeks we’ve been having problems with the Internet constantly cutting out, and awful crackling on the land line. I contacted Sky, our provider, and they sent a BT Openreach engineer to check the system. The pole in the road outside our property supplies several houses around, and apparently we were the last still to have the old copper wires. The engineer said that someone, while converting the cables for another house, had damaged something, and our cable was faulty. He sorted the problem, and got our system running again but said it was only a temporary fix, and the best thing to do would be to go onto fibre. I had had a message from Sky about this a few weeks ago and thought we probably should do this, so we went ahead and booked it.
Another engineer came and ran a new fibre-optic cable from the pole to the back of the house. The old phone cable ran through to a small box in my bathroom and thence down through the house to the hall where the main BT box and the Sky router were. He ran the new cable beside this, but then ran it down behind the drainpipe and installed a new box on the outside wall near the ground.
The final engineer came yesterday to connect everything up and install the new router, which had come in the post at the beginning of the week. We were told we had to return te old one to Sky. The engineer packed it up in the box the new one had come in, and stuck the return label on and everything, and all my hubby had to do was to drop it off at the Post Office.
The engineer said that it would be a terrible job running the new cable from the new outside box to the hall, as it would have to go around several doors, and it would look really messy too, because you cannot bend fibre-optic cable into a right-angle to fit around the door frames, or it will break, so it has to take a wider curve. He suggested simply running the cable through the wall, and putting the new router there. This is in the flat sitting room. There is a socket there, and I have put a small table there for the router to sit on. The landline phone now has to be connected to the router, so the main phone base unit also has to be inn the flat, instead of in the hall. My hubby suggested running a phone cable from the flat to the hall table but I said it was pointless – not only a lot of work and mess, with more cables on view, but it wasn’t necessary anyway. When I am downstairs in the sitting room, or if I’m in the kitchen, I have the phone with me, so it’s off the charger anyway, and it lasts all day. All we need to do is put it on the charger in its new location overnight, and if I don’t want the phone with me, it can either be on the charger, or left on the hall table. Simples. He saw the sense in that.
My office has always been a dead spot for Internet reception, and I bought a small plug-in booster to go on the landing to sort this problem. The engineer tested the signal all over the house and said that the new system has given us full coverage with a lot more power than previously, so this small booster is no longer necessary. I haven’t had a chance to try my upstairs laptop in the office yet but I have no doubt that it will be fine. With the router in the new position, the back of the house, upstairs and down, is now covered, and the front of the house has an extra boost from the smart TV.
He checked the TV for us, and gave us a new Sky box for the TV in the flat, which was faulty.
Everything seems to be working fine now, I am pleased to say.
So, all in all, the past couple of weeks have been busy, sorting all this lot out. The blog problem was really frustrating and after a long session yesterday I was more than happy to forget it for the evening, and pick up my embroidery for a bit of relaxation! This is what I now intend doing for the rest of the evening before bed.
