Are you interesting enough for 10 ‘quality’ posts a month?

Excluding writing about what you’ve found interesting on the Internet or just re-posting interesting articles from other sources, no other’s people’s Youtube, no global events, no interjections/ comments / reviews / thoughts / dreams / aspirations. Just your life, your actions, reactions, environment of your life, will it be interesting enough for ten quality posts a month, or how about 120 quality posts a year?

The foundation of this blog is a diary of me and the family, no thoughts, no rants (well that isn’t quite true, only a couple though), a few desires (mostly tech. stuff), some domestic events (National elections, flooding and so on) and certainly no dreams (only a few ‘hopes’ here and there).

This year I was going to try for ten quality posts per month, being a realist that I am, I don’t think I can make it, unless I throw one of the baby out of the window, that should provide me with content for the whole year, imagine all the trips to the court and prison :) (I am truly kidding, creating own content is one thing but creating a National headline is another).

Clicking ‘Next Blog’ to jump to the next blog (obviously) in the ‘Blogger Universe’ repeatedly, made me a bit sad but not surprised to see so many blogs started off so well, just like a new plant sitting on their windowsill, they must have watered it every day and really looked after it, because the quality and the number of posts were all so blooming. Then something happened, it suddenly wilted and died.

Looking at my own, for Q1 of 2010 I had only managed 8 postings; to tell you the truth having a family with small children really helps, all the hospital visits, all the holidays, wetting the bed and poop events (interesting to others or not, certainly are very interesting to us) are prime arsenal for my blog, as it was intended to be, a diary.

And I know now when this blog will die, probably when my kids are about 12 or 13, then I can not see myself writing to them (about them) anymore, in fact they will probably be keeping some kind of a blog of their own or more likely be using facebook / google+ like the rest of the universe. So most of my content would have disappeared, and where else will I likely to be spending my blog retirement, probably flickr :)

This is a test 5…

SendT said on a thread in Blogger’s help forum that the issue of URL not using the posts’ title have been solved, that is the main reason for this test 5 :)

Cheers Google, hope it works this time.

-----------------------

And it does :)

This is a test 4…

It had been a couple of days, so just wanted to give it another try to see if whether the post’s title had become the post’s URL or not or does the blogger’s URL still uses the first few words from the post.

 

(Nope: still not working properly).

This is a test 3...

Posting this from another blog client 'Blogjet' free trail version, same result as when posting via Windows Live Writer.

Kind people in the forum have escalate this to the Google Engineer, lets just wait and see :)

This is a test 2...

Posting this from within Blogger to see if it uses the post's title or the first few words of this line, :)

This is a test…

Somehow I have noticed that the post’s url wasn’t using the title but the first few lines of the post itself, very strange and that only happened today. Not sure if it's the Windows Live Writer or Blogger that is doing this…

OH oooohhhh, WLW has issue with the new theme - solved.

After fixing the width of the main post area, and updated the theme on WLW, all seems to be working seamlessly once again… :)

Now what can I do to f*&# it all up again :)

I am happy, fixing the blog content width.

I am not sure when Blogger have updated the tools for us blogger users, but this ‘Add CSS’ is amazing. Now I can tweak the codes until the keyboard breaks ;) My old theme (main-wrapper and so on) was quite simple to take and educated guess at the CSS code (for its function) but on the other hand my old theme did not work so well with the new tools that Blogger was putting up, together with my fiddling with the old theme at the CSS level, meant the new Blogger’s tools were absolutely useless to me, and that was one of the main reason I have decided to change theme.

Anyway it was fun to start again, and now being able to use all of the tools at Blogger is very enjoyable. However the new CSS codes were very different, not so easy to take an educated guess. The main thing that I wanted to do was to fix the ‘main post’ width, so that when I decide to change the theme again, the format (layout of content) of each post would remain the same.

I came up naught upon searching the net, so decided to copy out all the CSS and use the search to find any key words that could help me to fix the ‘main post’ width, so here it is.

Putting the below code into the ‘Add CSS’ worked for me.

body .main-inner .Blog {
width: 800px;
}

The above would fix the main post width, but the content (the actual words and pictures’) sits under another CSS codes.

.post-body {
width: 750px;
}

The above have fixed my main content to 750px, so if I decided to change the theme again all I have to do is set the content width to 750px then all things should look the same, it doesn’t take a lot to make me happy, and I am truly am happy :)

OH oooohhhh, WLW has issue with the new theme.

Everything was going swimmingly until last night, the blog is coming together nicely with the new theme, a lot of tweaking needed (but isn’t that part of the fun?), anyway I was preparing to walk down the arduous road of going through every post just to check the format until I realised that WLW (my fav.) was a little strange.

The WYSWYG is the key for me with WLW(Windows Live Writer), but with this new theme the theme on WLW wasn’t exactly the same as the theme on the blog, the width of the WLW imported theme is a little narrower making the well laid post on WLW becoming a little messy when upload to the site.

I had this problem before between WLW and Windows Live Blog, and that was the reason why I jumped ship to Blogger so many years ago.

Back to basic…

For the past few months or so I have been wanting to use another template on this blog, the original template that I have been using started off as a basic off the shelf theme, then with the power of internet I began to add things to it. Wanted a 3 levels drop down menu (had that), wanted a page navigation (had that), wanted little icon on my internet browser tab (had that), wanted round corners (had that too), the list goes on and on (even the ‘comment’ module I had to use Disqus). It looked fine when the page was loaded, but if you ever looked at the code behind it, it would give you fevers, I call it my private Frankenstein, for it was truly, truly messy.

But I had to do it that way, because when I first started using Blogger, the amount of customisation was very limited, and pretty basic, besides I was having far too much fun researching and trying different things, the community of bloggers on the Internet are amazing!!!

So I wanted to start again, using one of Google’s free template, this would clear out all clutter that had accumulated. I miss my drop down menu very much, but I am hoping one day a kind Google employee would have time to come up and offer a drop down menu for us mortals, instead of me using the hack and slash method to get the drop down menu, or the page navigation :)

I am pretty happy with this simple look, but most of the posts’ layout have gone a little wonky, and here begin the long task of looking at all the posts to correct the wonky ones, lol. It was just like when I moved from WindowsLive to Blogger.