Blogger/Blogspot - A Blessing and a Pain

Blogger/Blogspot.

It has truly been a blessing to me. But, as a lot of technology seems to be, it has also been a time-suck and source of frustration.

When we learned that we were going to Scotland for an extended time, I knew I wanted a way to communicate with my family and friends in a convenient way. I knew we would experience fun and interesting things and have a few adventures and I wanted to be able to tell about them and show pictures. Pictures are really important, don't you think?  They let you 'be there.' You can see for yourself what might be difficult to describe with words alone. And sometimes, a picture is worth a thousand words.

Several people suggested I start a blog.
But I will admit I was reluctant at first.

I do not journal and I have never been good at keeping a diary. I barely took notes on the calendar when my young children did things for the first time, like first words, and first steps, etc. I didn't think I had the self-discipline to actually follow through with a blog. But then someone encouraged me by telling that I only needed to post as often as I wanted to. Or as often as I had something to say. It didn't have to be once a week and it certainly did not have to be every day!

Our dear daughter-from-another-mother, Debby, who is a blogger herself, and yearns to be a professional fashion blogger, helped get me set-up. She suggested Blogger/Blogspot because it's free and easy to use. She helped me select the widgets (yes, I now know what a widget is - sort of) and helped me set up the structure and the visual parts and then helped me through my first post.

And it has been a WONDERFUL tool!  Mike and I have been able to communicate widely through both pictures and text and invite others to share in this adventure with us.

Blogger keeps some stats on my site and it tells me that we have 74 people subscribed to receive our posts via email.  Plus, I also post it to Facebook because not everyone who reads it has subscribed to it.   It also tells me how many times a post has been accessed. The most views a post has had is 236 - for the "Petty Things. "  

What is really fun is that we don't really know who all those people are who are seeing and reading and subscribing because we don't get a list of those names. But every now and then, someone will shout out, "I enjoy reading your blog!" And Mike and I will look at each other and say, "We didn't know they were reading the blog!"   Now, how fun is THAT? 

And it IS fun. But it is also work. It takes hours and hours to actually put a post together. It takes the initial writing. And then rewriting. Because of the way my phone syncs my photos to the Google cloud, I then have learned how to download pictures to the computer and then put them into a folder. I then have to transfer the pictures into Blogger so that I can select them to put into the post.  And then I mess with the text size and the spacing. And then there is a little more editing of text.  And all of it adds up to hours and hours per post.

It used to be that once I published it, I posted to FB and then closed it. But a few months ago, I happened to be looking at the actual website feed when I discovered that the post did not look like it had when I published it.  

This is how it looks in my Draft  - this is how I saw it

The text was a different font and the spacing of paragraphs and around pictures was off.

Turns out that what I see on my draft format and the way it publishes are not the same. 

This is how it looked after Publishing - this is how YOU saw it

Now, I realize that this is a free blog service, and part of me says, "If it's free, you are not allowed to complain about it,"  but don't you think that inconsistency is just wrong?  It makes me want to tell Blogger to hire my Front-End Web Developer son to 'fix' that.

So, I have since learned to look at "Preview" to see what you will see before I publish it. And that often requires me having to go back and forth between the Draft mode and the Preview mode to fix spacing issues and such. And even after all of that, they still do not look the same and is far from perfect. But it does work.

Until it doesn't.

And that is what this post is really about.

It suddenly stopped 'working' in the middle of February. I published "Edinburgh and the A.D.S.," to Google and then to Facebook and then waited for the email that tells me it was sent out to the subscribers. But the email did not arrive that day. 

And it didn't arrive the next day, either. 

So, trying to help it out, (and being the impatient person that I am because I want you to read it as soon as I publish it - or at least in a timely manner),  I copied and pasted it into a new post and published that. 
And that did it - it sent both of them.

So you received 2 of the same post.
Great.

Hoping that was a fluke, I later published "BINGO" but again, it didn't email subscribers, either.  So I did the same thing again - copied, pasted, republished. Again, double copies received.



This was becoming terribly frustrating to me. And even though I am not very technically competent, I was not waiting passively for all of this to sort itself. 

No, I was trying to research it myself to see if I could figure it out. 

But, being technology, I didn't get very far before I had to call my Number One Daughter @ Tech Support to help me.  She answered, "Hello, this is Number One Daughter @ Tech Support. My name is Kathryn. How may I help you?"  LOL!

And she really IS a help!  I contact her for all kinds of assistance.

For instance, when she was here in December we tried to figure out how to get videos and links to actually play in a post. And later that month, - combined with something I watched Mike do with links - I was able to do it successfully!  (remember the video clip at the end of "The W.C."?)



She also helped me in January when my phone said my free cloud storage was about to expire.

Well, we spent more time over these past few weeks trying to figure out why my posts weren't sending.  

I would just like to insert here that it's really really cool that she can use technology to see my actual screen and we can make things happen in real time, even though we are half a world apart.  

So, she and I ran a couple of experiments trying to test a theory.  And then just a couple of days ago, we thought we might have gotten it sorted because  the post was actually sent via email. I received it in my box yesterday morning. 

But then this morning, we got another email with earlier posts attached.  Hmmm. That was a surprise. 

And that is what has prompted this post.

Hopefully it is all caught up and it will all send automatically and on schedule again.

All of that is to say, please be patient. 
It's not all me. 
It's technology. 

And we all know technology is both a blessing and a pain.