hat, I’m still doing this? It’s been, what, weeks since my last DOG EAR.

Well, I’ve been busy. First off, I was off for two weeks in the wonderful Netherlands. And as my want, I write a blog each day about what we saw and experienced. That’s all find and good – with my tinytop computer, it’s nice to retire to the quiet lounge at the end of a day and just… reflect. It’s the writer’s thing to do.

And you can find all my recent travels HERE. The Netherlands are right at the top.

Anyway, I’ve been doing this for years. What I haven’t done recently is actually used this blog. Covid and all got in the way. So I went on the trip. Then I got home. I had all the postings ready in my tinytop in one big file which I moved across.Then I went into the site and couldn’t find shit. My travel blog? How did I do this again?

Now, this site is WordPress. I used to love Joomla – it was great. But then they did an update and I was told that to make it to the new version, I would have to make a full redesign. My old site would not work. I held out for a while and then the site got hacked through a long-outdated plugin (the plugin used for allowing comments on postings, which ironically I stopped using because of all the shit the blogbots posted on it (i.e. “Love your site. You make many points that are thoughtful. Come to my site at blahblah.com”)). Sure. And since i was deleted forty of these a week and nobody was really posting, I dropped the whole thing but it turns out it was the Achilles heel that let my site get compromised.

So I contracted some Indians via one of those job posting sites to redo my site in the more modern WordPress. It seems to work well. So there are posts, which is what this very thing you are reading is, and pages, which is more the construction of the website itself (Joomla was more set up so these were rather combined). Posts I’m okay with. Pages confuse the shit out of me.

I went into the post where I did trip reports originally – sure, there it was. Put in my new “Netherlands” area, hooked into the first blog posting, updated and nothing showed up. Messed with it for a bit and finally discovered that this was more legacy shit from the Joomla site and my clever Indians had constructed a new one – in Pages. Looked with the fear of a heroine exploring catacombs with a flickering torch and sure enough, there it was.

In short, it took some careful manipulating, some quiet cursing and some crying fits but finally I figured how to add my new entries to the page. Back in business.

But why no DOG EARs? Well, every post had to be reread and cleaned up for a final time. Then I had to find good photos, crop and resize them, and pull them into WordPress’s media folders. Then I had to assemble it all together, and add links (one to the trip page, then add a link from the former post to the current post (to inspire continuous reading). And when all that was done, I was hardly in a state to make sarcastic comments about media and our world.Frankly, I was pretty sick of media at that point.

So yes, putting up a post a day on a twelve day trip meant that the site was occupied with other things.

But we’re back in black now.

See you next week.

>>>AND HEY, CHECK OUT MY ACTUALLY-WORKING BOOKSHELF. MORE ABOUT THAT ADVENTURE NEXT WEEK!<<<