Tag Archives: wordpress

insta annoying

19 Tuesday Mar 2024

Posted by in instagram, iphone, social media

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insta annoying (1)

I don’t know what’s going on with Instagram. At first I thought it was my new iphone camera making things go wonky as it has a macro lens and other schmancy stuff. But then I realised things were only going wonky on Instagram. I used to always upload pics on Insta and do a bit of editing and that was fine, until recently. Suddenly the colours etc were coming out all wrong, and once uploaded not at all how they’d looked after I’d edited them. So then I tried not editing them at all… same problem.

And when I checked them against other platforms (twitter, bluesky, wordpress) as you can see, the pics on the left are normal, But as soon as they go up on Instagram they get all washed out, over exposed, over saturated. Anyone else having this problem?

insta annoying (2)

say #%*@! to the new wordpress block editor

29 Friday May 2020

Posted by in blogging, internet

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block editor
When the new Worpdress block editor became available (maybe a year or so ago?) I gave it a spin and immediately HATED it. It was so faffy, unintuitive and frustrating that I opted to install a classic editor plugin on my websites with WordPress installs, and continue using the classic option here. Then the other day I got an email from WP with the chirpy title Say Hello To The New WordPress Block Editor and my heart sank. Turns out that as of June 1st, WP is retiring the classic editor and that even now it shows up as the default editor. Gaaaah.

I suppose if I wanted to do all that fancy stuff then I would find the new bells and whistles interesting, but in fact it makes just putting up a regular post with a photo or two much harder, takes way longer, ruins the experience for me. Happily they still have a “classic editor block” that I can choose, but again it’s extra clicks just to get to where I want to be to start. I’m not sure if or how this will affect the other hosted sites but here’s hoping the plugin keeps working after June 1st. What do you think of the new editor?

no more facebook

23 Monday Jul 2018

Posted by in blogging, social media

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I had to open a personal Facebook page a few years ago in order to have FB Pages for my business(es). But I never used the personal page because, well, I just don’t like Facebook. Then a while back I noticed that I could publish my Casa Azahar blog post links on other platforms (FB, Twitter, Tumblr) and so I started doing that. Then I started getting occasional comments on my FB, even though to see the entire blog post you have to click through to WordPress. And so it became just another way of connecting with people, especially those whose only social media is FB.

But that’s all about to end. As of August 1st Facebook will no longer allow third party publishing on personal pages. Why? Who the fuck knows. So my FB personal page is soon to go dark. Apparently you will still be able to third party publish on FB business pages, so my option is to either change my personal FB page to a business one (and why would I do that?) or else start publishing directly on my personal page. But you know what? I simply don’t have time. I don’t use FB, rarely scroll through the timeline, etc. Even on my business pages (Sevilla Tapas & We Love Tapas) pretty much everything published there comes from my Instagram accounts.

I was actually surprised when I started getting all kinds of new FB friend requests on the personal page, since it’s just links to my blog (making it probably the most boring FB page out there). Because my blog, now more than 12 years old, went through a change starting in 2008, while recuperating from various cancer operations and going through chemo twice. It took on another meaning for me, and became almost like a daily “therapy session” when I gave myself the challenge to post something every day, no matter how sick or scared or lost I felt, so that at least each morning I had something to get out of bed for and to work towards. Which meant it turned it into a “daily scrapbook” (dear diary?) kind of blog, and I’ve kept it going that way ever since, mostly because if I ever stopped posting something every day I would feel pressure that the NEXT post will have to be about something interesting or important. 😉

I’ve never been sure how that translated on the FB format, to be honest, or if anyone actually clicked through to read entire blog posts on WordPress, but as of next week I won’t have to think about that anymore. This will be good news for those of you who friended me on FB only to discover that – eek – I just posted a bunch of crap all the time. And for those of you who enjoy reading my stuff, well, you can still find me on the Casa Azahar blog and chat with me here. You can even subscribe (link in the footer) so a wee notice pops in your email when something is posted, in case you forget to look. Well, I guess that’s it. Back to work now…

why so many blogs?

12 Saturday Jul 2014

Posted by in blogging, websites

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blogHello, my name is Shawn and I’m a blogaholic…

Except I’m not really. But I think some people are a bit confused about the way I run my online presence. So I hope I can explain why I do things the way I do here…

It actually all started with this blog – casa az – in May 2006, after leaving my first ever online community h2g2 (originally started by Douglas Adams). There was no real plan or purpose to this blog, it was just going to be bits of my life here and there. Then after I got sick with cancer it became something more important (at least to me) when I gave myself the challenge to post something here every day, no matter how silly or trivial, no matter how sick and awful I felt, just so I could feel I’d done something with my day. And since then I’ve maintained the one-post-a-day policy, which really makes this blog a scrapbook of random snippets that end up being just like anyone’s life. I make no claims that any of it is interesting so it’s a mystery to me that so many people are subscribed to this blog, and then almost nobody leaves comments. But whatever. I do this for me. If you like it too, hey that’s great, and welcome.

Then in 2007 everything changed for me when I posted a few photos of my tapas lunch and suddenly everyone wanted to know about tapas. This eventually became Sevilla Tapas, which went through a few versions before finding a permanent home on my first ever self-hosted site azahar-sevilla.com

azahar sevilla header

I was very new to this whole self-hosting gig back then and so I decided that azahar-sevilla.com would be the MAIN website (about what I wasn’t sure yet) and I would run other blogs on that site, which ended up being Sevilla Tapas, Azahar in Sevilla, Viva Las Tapas and Azahar’s Photos. As I didn’t know any better I set all these up as separate WordPress installs, so in fact they were each their own websites, but still connected to the azahar-sevilla domain. I’ve since been told that these didn’t need to be separate installs, and that the way I’d set it all up was very messy, but I actually found out differently later on.

azahar spain header

For the past couple of years I’ve been thinking about diversifying and especially about being able to offer a specialised trip planning service for Andalucía. This stayed on the back burner until recently when I felt ready to get it going. But of course it couldn’t be a part of azahar-sevilla.com… it couldn’t be “city specific”. And to be honest, I am starting with Andalucía because that is what I know, but this could end up being a whole Spain thing. And so I came up with azahar-spain.com, which can encompass a lot.

My first thought was to incorporate azahar-sevilla.com with my new azahar-spain.com site… except azahar-sevilla.com actually has a very good Google rating and I’d be stupid to throw that away and start over from scratch. And anyhow, it made sense to keep them separate. Plus, although I very happily live in Sevilla now, I may choose to live elsewhere in Spain in future… so this is why I decided to diversify and also start the new website azahar-spain.com.

For those of you who find it confusing, it really isn’t. It goes like this – just two domains with their blogs and with obvious ways to link back to the main pages.

azahar-sevilla.com | azahar-sevilla.com/sevillatapas | azahar-sevilla.com/photos

azahar-spain.com | azahar-spain.com/azahartapas | azahar-spain.com/kitchen

I was told by my friend and SEO guru that I could actually incorporate blogs into my original WordPress install (so I didn’t have to create a separate WP install for each blog) but it turns out – as far as I know – that these are more limited blog-page “category” options and you are only allowed one of this sort of thing for each WP install. This is actually set up on the new website, but there were some glitches moving the existing content over to the older azahar-sevilla site so I’m not sure if I’ll be able to fix that.

So there you go! All clear now? 😉