Category: David Harrison

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Starting to Blog with WordPress.com

I promised a tutorial on how to setup a WordPress account and create your own website. Here it is. It doesn’t cover writing posts and the like, that is covered elsewhere in the WordPress tutorials, where you could start at Lesson 5,  but it does get you to the point when you can begin to be creative. Hope you have some fun!

Step 1 – Go to WordPress.com and click on Start with Free …

Step 2 – The following screen will show …

Step 3 – Click on Get started, and you will be presented with a choice, to setup a WordPress.com account, or create one linked to your Google (Gmail) account. I will do the former …

… and supply an email address (it happens to be a Google one) and then a Password. I will then be asked to supply a Username. A Username can only contain lowercase letters and numbers …

You’ve setup your WordPress.com account – remember those details – UserID and Password (as well as the email address you used).

Step 4 – You are now asked some questions to help set up the website.

I suggest you choose the first option for now …

… and then maybe the last one on the next screen …

… then click on Continue with Free on this last Setup screen …

… before you give your website an address – a URL …

Step 5 – I’m not expecting that you’ll own a domain yourself at this stage, so just click on Continue …

WordPress will then check to see whether it can find a unique URL for you to use. There will be one in the list that is Free – select that one …

… ignore all others. You can see I’m going to grab cardiffu3acg.wordpress.com – which is quite a nice one …

… so I’ll Confirm my choice!

Step 6 – I’ll change the name of the site on the next screen from cardiffu3acg to …

[NB – This website was not created with this URL, it was used purely for demonstration purposes and does not exist.]

That should then be accepted and you’ve got a website. Congratulations! You can then go on to supply a little more information before you start to write your first Post …

… perhaps do the first one which explains a little more what your site is all about, and then start “playing” with the menu bar on the left-hand side of your browser screen …


… or even Add a New Site!

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Beware the free upgrade

So … we’re all excited about the advent of iOS 11 for our iPads and iPhones aren’t we? Or we are if our devices can actually take the new operating system. And there’s the first challenge. Apple gives us free upgrades to its operating system software but it comes at a price in terms of the pensioning off of some hardware from ongoing support.
So, if you don’t have any of the hardware on the list below … stop reading this post and go and do something constructive.

So what’s wrong with iOS 11, nothing of course, it looks like a really feature-rich release with lots of goodies to enjoy and reports seem to suggest that it doesn’t slow down your device significantly … except it’s a wholly 64-bit operating system. This means that all applications that you run on the device must be written in code that runs on a 64-bit operating system, and the problem is that quite a few of your applications, even some you really like, may have been written using older 32-bit code. You may even have noticed some alerts coming up on your screen to say “contact the developer” when you’ve been running an application – that’s the reason for the alerts – your app is potentially going “end of life”. So … before you do the automatic upgrade just do these checks.
Goto Settings > General > About and you will see something like this …

… click on Applications, and something like this will be shown …

… read the warning message at the top of your screen carefully. What it is saying is that these apps are written in 32-bit code and will tend to run slower than if they were written in 64-bit code. What is more, they will stop working with iOS 11. Then clicking on any of the apps shown on your iPhone (similar to the ones above on my iPhone), will give you this screen message which effectively says that the app is end-of-life UNLESS the developer provides a 64-bit version.

Now most of these apps on my iPhone I can probably do without but I do know that I ought to approach Cardiff Bus to find out when their 64-bit version of the Timetable and Journey Map is going to be released, as I use that a lot!