Everything is so hard…

Phew.

In my continuing efforts to make my blogging life both easier and more productive, I have spent hours at my computer doing things that have not been as easy as they should have been and which have most certainly not been in the least productive.

Sigh.

This process has not been helped today by the fact that we sat up until the not-all-that-early hours of today and had rather a deal to drink. It must have been around 4am when we settled down and I was up by 9am, not having had much sleep at all.

Items for the tick list:

  • Investigated IFTTT and
  • made a couple of accounts to push Instagram posts to Woolgathering and Two Snails
  • Got post-by-email up and running on all three blogs, though I am unlikely to need this facility at Crooked House, it keeps things tidy to have all blogs working the same way
  • as a side activity (though no less important) printed off that highly useful webpage “Heels by Number” so that I can remind myself how to get those heels turned…

I found IFTTT challenging but only because I hadn’t come across it before and the concepts were new to me. I was irritated to have to create multiple accounts, which is why I didn’t progress with Crooked House.

In fact, IFTTT is very simple to use. I shall explore its use further some other time. Soon, perhaps. I would like to connect some of my minor IG accounts to this blog. Why, you may well ask, Why indeed, seeing as I don’t seem to use IG. Well, perhaps I might use it more often now the connections are in place. It would seem to offer the best and fastest way of transferring images to the blog without the use of an editing package or the uploading of large files.

By far the biggest challenge for me is learning to use a phone camera, and worse still the tablet camera. I just don’t get it. How do folks manage to take decent shots with these things? My devices defeat me and I much prefer a proper camera. However, the large images that they create are difficult to deal with when on the road, with little power and even less bandwidth (roaming data).

Disappointingly, the services offered do not include Blipfoto. I should have liked to push Blips over to the blog – it would be a quick and easy way of sending blog posts as I have Blipfoto apps on both phone and tablet.

Both blogs are set up to Publicise to both Twitter and Facebook, so anything that reaches the blogs should be linked from those services. There will be some inevitable duplication, I fear.

As for posting to the blogs via email, I had this up and running previously and used it on our first trip to Spain. When we were in Italy earlier this year I attempted to post by email but nothing came out on Two Snails. I have been beating my brains out as to why it no longer appeared to be working. I installed a plugin to replace the native function. That didn’t work either (after I had been and created three new Googlemail accounts for the purpose).

Mystified, I headed off to WordPress Support to see if anybody had reported problems and one summary caught my eye. It was referring to a Jetpack post by mail facility. I investigated and found that at some point Jetpack had updated with this new facility and it was defaulted to ON. I think that it must override and turn off all other post by mail functions.

So, after spending hours attempting to debug, it turned out to be as simple as a single-button-press operation. Worked instantly and very sweetly and I have successfully sent test posts to all three blogs. I have also very sensibly created Contact cards in Googlemail for the super-secret nonsense addresses as I have no hope at all of being able to remember them.

Now all that I have to do is to read, digest and then learn the short codes for formatting and controlling content, There may be hiccups along the way but no doubt I shall get the hang of it.

My time would have been better spent in packing the van, I think.

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