Just thoughts …

Category: Socialmedia

  • Yorkshire Sculpture Park

    YSP (02)150320A great day out with Stuart at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park. I’m sure he lost count of the times I said – I don’t do culture. That’s of course not strictly true, but I do find it challenging to engage with abstract sculpture and most modern art. It’s therefore not surprising that the pieces I enjoyed best were ones that I could work out what they were!

    A collection of the images I took during our visit can be seen here on Picasaweb. In time, when the new Google Photos has got itself sorted out, I’ll find a better way to create albums than the way I did creating this one. I plan to write a blog post on the subject on this blog as soon as I have the time!

    My time has been pretty much taken up just recently with launching two new blogs. The first “Thought grazing 3A” to support a community initiative on Streetlife in North Cardiff where I’ve offered IT enablement support for Third Agers. The second has been the re-launch, with a new theme and new features, of “Moments like these …” my photo blog which also has Fundraising attached to it.

    I’m not sure whether this will turn out to be a good idea, or not, but quite a few people have been kind enough to say how much they’ve liked some (not all) of the photographs I’ve taken.

    I thought long and hard about whether to set up an eCommerce site to sell them, but in the end changes in VAT Rules and Regulations by HMRC convinced me not to go down that route – after all, I don’t really need the income, and I don’t really want the hassle of printing and framing more than a few special requests. I just want to get out and walk and take more photographs! So if you would like a high resolution digital copy of any of my images, or you just want to show some appreciation, go to the Fundraising page on “Moments like these …” and (this year) help The Ramblers.

  • Papa Smurf goes bananas

    Papa Smurf goes bananas

    Papa SmurfWell … what a day in social media world I had yesterday!

    At an unearthly hour of the morning I received a text from my son to say that he always read my blog posts because even though he might not understand them – he always felt that he ought to, just in case there was something he could actually TALK to me about … rather than just converse via Google+ (we live approximately half-a-mile away from each other)!

    This was then followed by a Google+ comment from my sister – also before I’d fully woken up, and finally my wife (away for a few days) who wondered what was happening to her Google+ app on her iPhone which was being bombarded by posts from me.

    By this time I’d observed for myself that for some bizarre reason, three really old posts on an old blog were being published to Google+. Why? How? I couldn’t see to the problem immediately – I had to give DJ a lift to the airport. Then I had to attend to a central heating problem and then, to cap it all (and by the time I’d sat down) – the broadband was down and wouldn’t be up until the afternoon, meaning I wouldn’t be able to do more than sticking plaster stuff on the blog until I could get full access. So I just disabled any plugin that could in any way be associated with Google from this blog and deleted all the posts from Google+, put up an apologetic post and hoped I’d arrested the flow of “spam” posts.

    I hadn’t 🙁

    By the time I got the broadband back it had become obvious that the problem lay with my dormant former “Just thoughts …” site and by now, exasperated and fed-up with deleting Google+ posts I took the nuclear option and just nuked the site! It’s gone, no more, I’ll get a proper redirection in place as soon as possible but for now all you can see is a simple index.html file – diharrison.com is no more 🙁

    Brainy SmurfWhat caused all this heartache? I don’t think I’ll ever know … what I needed was access to Brainy Smurf to provide all the answers. Was it an out-of-date WordPress installation? Was it a change in a Google+ API? Was it just Friday 13th? I don’t think I’ll ever know. Certainly not now, as the website has been sent to the Room 101 of websites where all redundant and unneeded websites should go. I sent a follow-up apologetic post.

    A while ago, I posted on revising my blogging strategy and the need for simplification. I think I need to review this yet again.

    Why the Smurfs … I think you need to ask a couple of great friends that question.