Lost under the Hood

Why I got lost under the hood of computers, software and camera’s the last couple of weeks which prevented me from churning out many new blog posts that I have in my sleeve:

• I upgraded to WordPress 2.8, but had to upgrade to Thesis 1.5.1. first. I just had installed Thesis 1.5 last month on the recommendation of fellow travel bloggers Todd Lucier and Darren Cronian.
  In upgrading to Thesis 1.5,1 I lost a lot of my Thesis 1.5 settings. It seemed to be a bug somewhere, but I couldn’t pinpoint where and lost a lot of time getting the blog in order once more.
• For future reference I’m listing some bloggers that use the Thesis Theme and give good advice on the ins and outs:
  • Problogger
  • Chris Brogan (have to read Two Really Useful Thesis Documents)
  • Matt Cuts of Google
  • Chris Pearson
  • Remarka Blogger
  • Girlie Geek
  • How to make my Blog a really helpful guy.
• And Some Travel Bloggers who use Thesis:
  • My Itchy Travel Feet
  • Shannon Hurst Lane (added August 11, 2009)
  • Hotel Marketing Strategies (added August 11, 2009)
• I’m trying to really understand SEO for bloggers … a bit cumbersome. Time consuming reading. However i did install a robots.txt file for both my blogs and the Sitemap generator Plugin is now working correctly…
• During a thunderstorm I closed my office server down. It had been running year after year under Novell Netware 5.
  I was prepared for this happening: A brand new server which was already loaded with Netware 6.5 stood ready for the occasion. One tiny problem: It appeared that I needed to redo the login scripting…having some special needs as I still rely on some DOS programs – not solved yet….
  Meanwhile I succeeded to lose all my Windows XP settings for e-mail, site logons and so on. Although I have reasonable backups…the backups of my settings just didn’t work. Lesson learned: Do operate as a separate user under Windows XP without administrator permissions: Once you change an XP administrator’s password (I was only hitting a password sync button in the Netware login screen that did not give the usual XP warning) all his settings are lost. Darn! A lot of time to reconnect e-mail accounts….login passwords….sites…etcetera.
• Some hard disks are getting full. Dire need for some time consuming reshuffling
• Next week I’ll act as a wedding photographer. While trying some lenses and new flashcards it turned out that inadvertently I had obtained not working white label flashcards for my camera’s. Yesterday was Veterans’Day in The Hague. I lost approx 180 photos I took.
• In preparation for that same wedding shoot I’m also struggling uphill to understand PhotoShop better than I did.
• Have had some discussions with Tripadvisor as to why some guest reviews did not appear on their site. Wanted to report about that, but didn’t have time (yet?). Why would I actually want to have any reviews there?
• I was invited by e-mail to attend the opening of The Hermitage Openening in Amsterdam. I Filed the form they required to get a ticked, but never got the ticket…alas.
• Then there is that discussion again about the Dying Blogs: in the Guardian by Charles Arthur by Shiny Shiny and by Copy Blogger

Deep Sigh…continuing struggling…and maybe updating this…

Last edited by Happy Hotelier on July 17, 2010 at 3:01 pm9