blog housekeeping

5 Lessons I Learned From Looking Back

16 Comments Posted on by Snoskred

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Recently I went back through all the posts I’d written here on the blog. While looking back I learned some lessons which might be useful to other people, so I thought I would share them with you. :)

5. About Categories –

I wrote a little about this in an earlier post – Sephyroth Is A Genius – I think the most important lesson I learned was to come up with a decent plan for categories and then stick to it.

4. About Better Post Titles –

Before I learned anything about blogging, my post titles were in general pretty terrible. Sometimes they did not relate in any way to the text of the post. Here are a few examples of crappy titles I once used – Quick Blog – Yeah I know – Eek! – W00t! –

How To Fix This –

Write better titles. Read some articles about writing better titles. In general my titles now tend to give people an idea of what the post itself is about, but I still think I could do better. :)

3. About Posting Images –

Sometimes images that I had posted were no longer available. Many of these were my *own* images which Blogger had deleted as a surprise to me. They actually do that fairly regularly. I did not delete any Picasa albums, so I have no idea why my images vanished, and I can’t be bothered trying to figure it out. If a post relied heavily on pictures that were now missing, I had to make the difficult decision to delete those posts and move on.

Also, with some images I had done a bit of a bad thing – back in the days before I knew better – I had “hot linked” to images on other sites. I had no idea that was not the done thing. I know better now. :)

How To Fix This –

Now I keep all my blog images on my own blog, plus I put them into a folder called “posted” when I have posted them, so I could easily find them again if I needed to. Plus, Absolutely No Hotlinking – eg posting an image that resides on another site here on my site.

2. About Posting Links –

Blogs disappear. They move without leaving a forwarding address. News articles disappear, too. I had based several blog posts on a post from another blogger or a news article without including enough information – and when the post or news article disappeared, my post no longer made any sense. Those posts had to be deleted.

Take this post – I want to work here – as an example. If the post I had linked to no longer existed, how much sense would that post make? Zero.

How To Fix This –

When I write posts in the future, I need to make sure my posts can stand alone – if I am linking to another post or a news article, it might be an idea to take a screenshot of the article and include that in the post or save a copy of the article somewhere, in case the original disappears. Links should play a supporting role, not be the star of a post I write.

1. About Posting Videos –

I had to delete about 40 posts where I had posted just a title and a youtube video. In almost all of these cases, the title was something like “I Love This Video” or “This Video Is Awesome” and nowhere in the post did I happen to mention the NAME of the video or the artist. When I went to play the video, I got the youtube message “This video has been removed due to X, Y or Z reason”.

Without a name or an artist or any idea what video I might have posted, it was impossible to fix these posts to resemble the original post. They had to be deleted.

How To Fix This –

Going forward, I will always make sure to include the video name and artist when posting videos.

blog housekeeping, blogging tips

Sephyroth Is A Genius

9 Comments Posted on by Snoskred

flower

I mentioned here on the blog a while ago that I was going through my old posts – updating links, making sure videos still worked, and removing some overly negative posts about an old workplace and about one particular family member.

As a part of this process, I realised that my categories were.. not brilliant. Not at all optimal. They really needed someone with a pedantic flair to take a look at them and completely re-do them. Hmm. Who do I know with a pedantic flair? This seemed like a job for only one person on earth – my excellent friend Sephyroth.

pedantry

So I sent off an email on February 28th..

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And on March 23rd, I received me a reply! Parent categories with child categories. This seemed like a good plan.

For some reason I thought I would wait until I finished going through all the posts in order to make the suggested changes. That was a bit of a mistake to be honest. But on the 1st of June I finally finished reviewing all the posts and so I sat down today to begin making the changes.. half an hour later, I sent off another email..

pedantry5

The Other Half helped out by adding the little + and – so that all you will see to begin with is the parent categories. Like this –

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If you click on the parent category, you will see all posts for that parent category. I may still do some tweaking in the weeks to follow, but for now I’m happy with the results. YAY! ;)

In Other Blog News

I made some changes to the right hand sidebar, adding more articles and putting them in different categories.

Sephyroth helped me out once again with the padding on the posts because we had to do a theme update and lost a lot of our changes to the theme as a surprise. This will not happen again as we are now using a child theme, long story and way too technical, but it means things like link colour, text size, and teeny little settings on the blog that readers are not even aware of, like 10 pixels of padding around paragraphs, headings and photos, are in a separate file so future updates to the theme will not cause those changes to be lost.

On the right hand sidebar, The Other Half coded a thing, which means my comments no longer appear in the most recent comments stream. This is great because I often go through and reply to comments in one sitting, so you tend to see a lot of comments from me suddenly.

Yesterday..

moments

Wow, what a huge day here on the blog yesterday! Just 3 minutes after the scam warning post went live, on average there were 120 visitors every hour. Interestingly, there was a very Australian skew to the people who were sent this email. Here’s a screenshot taken at midnight AEST..

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People from 22 more countries than you can see here dropped by, which makes 32 countries in total. Many of the people who arrived were good enough to take the time to leave a comment with the name and email address and in some cases the email they were sent. Plus, a lot of people sent me emails via my contact page with that info.

I’ve sent an email off to outlook.com to let them know what has been going on, because every email address used was an outlook.com one. Most troubling, they seem to be bot generated.

What’s Happening At Yours?

Let me know in the comments! :)

blog housekeeping, Happy Snoskred, Sephyroth

Introducing A New Blog Series

2 Comments Posted on by Snoskred

79beach3

I love it when bloggers I read and enjoy post about blogs *they* read and enjoy. It happens regularly and I often end up adding the blog(s) they wrote about to my feed reader..

I always mean to write a post about my favourite blogs but never quite manage to get around to it. So today I will like to thank Sammie from The Annoyed Thyroid for writing this post which has pushed me to finally start a new series here on the blog – it will be called –

Snoskred Faves

This will be a series of posts, not just one post. There are so many blogs I love and want to highlight, if I put them all into one post it would be incredibly long.

How Will This Series Work?

I’m not really sure yet. I might post about one blog at a time. I might do a post with 3-5 blogs. I might send a little interview request to some of my favourite bloggers and see who replies. It might be a once a week thing, or I might post one when the mood strikes me. We Will See. :)

How I (Blog) Roll.

I actually enjoy *all* the blogs listed on my blogroll.

There are 206 blogs presently listed on my blogroll. That is a lot of blogs! Within that 206, there are some blogs that stand out from the crowd.

These stand outs are blogs that I am super excited to read another post from, blogs and bloggers that I think about when not near my computer, bloggers who say things that stick in my head and pop up in my conversations away from the web, blogs that I look forward to reading and mentally know approximately when the next post should come to me as a surprise.. these blogs end up in..

Faves Folders

These blogs eventually get picked out of their folders and placed into what I like to call “Faves” folders – there are now multiple faves folders so I can break up their goodness into small and tasty snacks.

Sometimes new feeds blogs get moved to a Faves folder long before the 6 month test out new blogs time ends. They still get added to the blogroll at the usual time – that is, when I do the new feeds review at the end of 6 months.

Making Contact

Some of the blogs I love make contacting them a little bit difficult – please, bloggers, if you are reading this, make sure you have either a contact form or an email address somewhere that people can easily find it. :) If I can’t reach you via email or a contact form, I’ll leave a comment asking you to email me.

Not Listed On My Blogroll?

If you are not on my blogroll but I have left a comment on your blog, chances are you are one of the new feeds I am trying out.

If you are not on my blogroll or my new feeds list, but you would like to be, you can contact me with a link to your blog. Your blog will then go through my new feeds process.

Coming Up –

In just an hour, I will post the very first Snoskred Faves!

Over to you!

In the meantime, if you want to suggest blogs to me that I should be reading, please do. I value the opinions of my regular readers and commentators and some of your favourite blogs have become my faves, too.

blog housekeeping, blogrolls, Snoskred Faves

In case you missed it

12 Comments Posted on by Snoskred

butterfly

Wills and Kate have a new daughter! YAY! My two favourite Kate-watching sites have excellent posts up about this.

The Cambridges Present Their Princess to the World!

William in Blue and Kate in Buttercup Yellow to Take Home HRH, Princess of Cambridge

Many more pics on the Daily Mail story – including many pics of a somewhat baffled George when Wills brought him along to meet his new sister, perfectly color coordinated with each other in navy blue. I love how Kate has made blue one of the signature colours of their family.

The new daughter is unnamed as yet. My guess for the name is Charlotte, but it may be a few days before it is announced. The family has already departed the hospital for home..

In Other News –

Here on the blog, tomorrow we start a new blog series. You will see two posts – the first telling you a little about the series and the second will contain the first post in the series.

On Wednesday you will see a couple of photos and videos from my candle burning area.

Also later this week I have a couple of how-to posts planned. One is for those on Blogger which will tell you how to add a subscribe to comments tick box, and the other is for WordPress which will tell you how to add a follow button to a self hosted wordpress site – and I might add in how to do it for a regular wordpress.com site as well, though that is a lot simpler.

Happy moments all round!

blog housekeeping, Happy Snoskred, The Royals, yay

Irritatory & Quick Update

11 Comments Posted on by Snoskred

flow1

School

This week I went to orientation for the course I am starting next week..

Deities, pretty please, I beg you, give me patience and strength, or else I will not make it through this course without deading people.

Within moments of arriving at the orientation meeting point, there were 3 people who right away showed me exactly who they were, and they are not people I want to know or be involved with. Obviously they all knew each other, and they started right away talking about how little work they thought they could get away with doing, and how this course would be such a bludge festival for them, and what would be the earliest moment they could sneak away for a cigarette.

ROLL EYES NOW.

But it turns out, these three *are* special snowflakes who have done a previous course with this teacher, and a lot of the work they did for their previous course will be accepted for this course, so my earnest hope is that they are rarely in our presence. Please let this be so!

Within moments of sitting down for our orientation, these three were chit chatting amongst themselves, totally ignoring the teacher and the rest of us. It did not take long for them to earn my death stare, nor the death stare of the other *adults* who will be taking this class and who actually wanted to hear what the teacher had to say without the distraction of their special snowflake conversations..

The teacher actually sent them away halfway through the orientation saying they did not need to stay and immediately the atmosphere improved. I found quite a few people I felt drawn to and will like to know more about. That is a good sign for me.

Anyway, we’ll have to see how the special snowflake situation goes. Fingers crossed they will disappear into the bludgeosphere, leaving the rest of us to work together, because I found them extremely irritatory – that is one of my special made up words. It feels exactly how it sounds.

Yes, I know, I am meant to tolerate, etc, yada yada, blah blah, whatevs. But I actually want to do this course and enjoy the work involved with it and anyone who is not there to do exactly that should get the heck out of my way, STAT!

Blog Theme Update

I still had a couple of things I want to fix around here, most important being the ability for people to subscribe to comments which seemed to have vanished with the theme upgrade – You should now see checkboxes and the options Notify me of new comments via email & Notify me of new posts via email at the very bottom of the comment box.

Sadly to get that back, we’ve had to lose my gorgeous blue comment box. It turns out WordPress Jetpack now pulls the comment box from wordpress.com and we have zero control over the CSS, apparently, so we couldn’t get the notify me stuff to be in white.

With that said, if you comment a lot on wordpress blogs you probably want to get yourself a wordpress.com or gravatar account because that gives you notifications when someone replies to your comment automatically. It is free to make an account, and it means you won’t have to type all the stuff into the box each time you comment. :)

Blogging Update

Over here at Life In The Country I have scheduled posts for Mon-Wed-Fri up till the end of February. I’m hoping to have scheduled posts set up till the end of March by the end of this week because once I start school I am not sure how much time I’ll have.

If you see something on Tues-Thur-Sat-Sun – you know those posts are add ins – generally I try not to do that and instead push out a scheduled post, which I have done with this post.

I’ve decided for now not to return Shoe Sunday or start a new blogging series as my plate may be pretty full these first 6 months. A huge thank you to those who did participate in Shoe Sunday and maybe June will see it return.

Rewatch Breaking Bad

The Rewatch Breaking Bad blog is nearly at the end of season 3 – just two more episodes – then it swings into season 4 which was by far my favourite season on the show, closely followed by the almost perfect season 5.

If you have never seen the show I do highly recommend it for a lot of reasons, in particular the amazing performances of Bryan Cranston and Aaron Paul.

I have cut back the posting schedule to once a week on Sundays. I already have 8 pre-written and scheduled posts over there and by the end of this week I’d like to make that 12 or even 16 which would nearly take me up to the end of the course. Those posts are a fair bit of work, involving taking screenshots for each episode – those posts take time and effort I might not be able to spare as often while I’m at school.

There is more but I am going to warn you – it talks about spiders – there are no images, I would never do that to you – and if you don’t want to *read* about spiders either, please don’t click through. I won’t inflict them on you as a surprise. My arachnophobia is presently at an all time high, with good reason.

Continue reading →

blog housekeeping, garden, Shoe Linkup, spider

Housekeeping Note

7 Comments Posted on by Snoskred

banksia

Today is the day that my password protected post will publish..

It should be noted that Sephyroth guessed my password on the first try. Predictable, I am!

But unless you know me as well as Sephyroth does, or alternatively, you are psychic..

if you want to read the post today you’ll need to email me for the password

Send a quick email with the word password somewhere in it to snoskred {at} gmail {dot} com – Or use my Contact Form

Sephyroth is blogging again, and has posted a big update, if you want to drop on by.

The theme things which I wanted to fix have been fixed. If you can spot them, congratulations, because they were mostly tiny tweaks.

One other tiny note – I am going through old posts – they will fall into three categories – posts to delete, posts to keep and posts to update. I know there are dead links, videos which no longer work, and some negativity I want to remove from the WWW forevz.

Moving forward while looking back can be dangerous, I might trip over something. But I feel like it needs to be done, to move forward with the new improved 2015 Snoskred.

About Snoskred, blog design, blog housekeeping, Password Protected Posts

Done, for now at least.

2 Comments Posted on by Snoskred

newblog

So, we have a new theme! YAY! Welcome to Adaption, which changes depending on the way you are viewing the blog. If you do not see two sidebars – one on the left, one on the right, like the image above, then you are getting a smaller version of the theme.

We have a new title image too – unfortunately this theme does not allow for a large header image like we have been used to here at Life In The Country.

There are a few little changes still to be made, eg the comments area I want to make some changes and we’ve removed a lot of extra padding but will have to add some back in for the text of the posts I think, as my line breaks seem to have gone AWOL. But for the most part this is how it will stay and I’m deeply thrilled we achieved it in a few hours.

PS I love how meta this screenshot is, showing a screenshot of the old design and then the new design surrounding it. :)

blog design, blog housekeeping, Happy Snoskred, moving forward

Testing Was A Fail

3 Comments Posted on by Snoskred

posterity

A screenshot, for posterity.. :)

To those who were having issues – some could not see the password box, and some could see that and get the post but then the comments did not appear.. Twas not you, twas the theme.

Cue, working on a new theme. The site will go into maintenance mode for a little bit. The other half and I will work like crazed.. well, I’m not sure what but I know it will involve THE CRAZY here.

I am quite terrified given how horrendous it was to create the first theme. Then again, we know so much more about html and themes etc than we did back then. Plus, I really am not difficult to please. I want to take some of my favourite elements here, ad put them into a new design.

I’ll give you a headsup once we’re back online and fingers crossed, with a spiffy looking new theme. :)

If nobody hears from us for 24 hours, send help. And donuts. :)

Annoyed Snoskred, blog design, blog housekeeping, moving forward, Worried Snoskred

About To Test

Leave a comment Posted on by Snoskred

ss9

the password protect thingy here on the blog, tomorrow..

The password will be the same for the test post and for the upcoming post on Monday

If you will like the password, you can request it now – simply use the contact form here or email snoskred {at} gmail {dot} com – all you need to say in your email is “password” :) You can say more if you want, too! ;)

Please To Note –

I will be replying to emails with the password over the weekend – at the time this post is scheduled to post I will be fast asleep as the body clock has got a bit out of whack over the past month or so and I want to get it back on track.

blog housekeeping, Password Protected Posts