Friday 20 March 2026: Tech woes (again!)

I forgot to mention yesterday that when I’d done the premium 40 prompts article for March, I posted it to Patreon and I submitted it to Medium. Overnight I received confirmation that Medium had accepted it and that it was scheduled for publication today. That’s now 3 chapters complete for the 40 prompts and 2 chapters complete for the take one idea…

Next week I’ll do the third take one idea… article to make that 3 chapters there too. The week after I’ll do the where to send the January story we worked on previously. I’m toying with a here’s one I did earlier… for next month so I have 4 articles/chapters each month on different topics in the same series.

For the book I want to try and come up with 40 evergreen articles each month, so the main book doesn’t have to be changed every year. Then I might do a companion gazetteer to go with it after that that’s year specific. Most of the March prompts (for September stories) were evergreens this time. There are so many celebration days now, I should be able to come up with 40, or perhaps a consistent 30 (one for each day of the month?).

We were up raving early yesterday. The poet had to get up and drive over the Pennines for a 9am workshop he was leading, so he was up with the larks. The puppy initially got up with him then came back to bed. But he didn’t settle and within about 15 minutes he was ready to get up again. I kept him there for as long as I could and then got up on time to start my own chores and tasks of the day.

Once I’d fed the pup I had almost the full half hour for my dirty cuppa. I took almost a full half hour to do my 15 minutes of morning pages…Yup, I kept going after the pinger went, but I came up with under 400 words this time as it was a bit of a listicle towards the end, rather than the piece of character prose I’d hoped for. I thrashed out another issue, though. These are all helping me get my head around how to fit everything in, what to include, including some additions, and what to drop next year.

I had a full reading half hour and then it was time for my housework half hour. All these things used to be an hour. Now they’re all half an hour each. I’m getting more done, but sometimes I get my teeth into something and don’t want to stop.

Take yesterday’s morning half hour, for example. I hung some washing up on the clothes horse because it was still damp and foggy outside. I put all the clothes away I’d dried on the washing line the day before. I put all the clothes away I’d taken from the clothes horse the day before and folded and taken into the bedroom. And I emptied the dishwasher. All good, and all just within the housework half hour…

Then I thought I’d try out a hack I’d seen for folding underwear so it takes up less room. I started with one of the poet’s drawers and once I’d got into a rhythm, it went quite quickly. But looking at his drawer, it looks like I’ve thrown out more than half of what’s in there. I haven’t, but it will be interesting to see what he thinks when he sees it.

That went so well that I turned to one of my own drawers too. And the exact same thing happened. But rather than leave the drawer looking almost a third empty, I moved my handkerchiefs into it. If we move the poet’s handkerchiefs into his underwear drawer, that will actually free up a whole drawer.

Before he had his nose op a few years ago, he was getting through hankies at a rate of knots. When there was a loo roll/tissue/kitchen roll shortage during the pandemic one of the things we did was buy him a load of hankies. But he got through 4 a day, at least. So he has a lot. And yes, they take up an entire (small) drawer. If we move them over, that’s one drawer less we’ll need at the new house…

…because we have a major scaling down operation ahead of us, and I think if we/I do a clothes drawer/cupboard a day, tidying it up, maximising space, throwing out stuff we don’t wear any more, that will at least help when we move. We’ve been carting a lot of stuff around with us for years, moving house every 2 years until this house. Now we have to get a bit savvy on space-saving/space-maximising, and I’m learning as many hacks as I can.

Doing that took me way over the allotted 30 minutes for housework. And rather than push my entire day back, I shortened the dog walk. When we got back from his walk, I was in good time to start the next task on my list, week 4 of the plotting with depth workshop.

So far, so good…and then I fell down a rabbit hole. Because I noticed something wasn’t quite right with my website. The sidebar was duplicating itself all the way down the page and I couldn’t for the life of me find out why it was doing that.

The first thing I checked was my theme. But all the sidebar widgets were fine. There was only one of everything. I tried turning the sidebar off and on again, and there it all was again. I turned off the ticker along the top, wondering if it was causing a glitch somewhere. Nope. I reduced the number of posts on one page. Nope. And I reduced the number of items in the sidebar. Nope.

There was still at least 3 of everything going all the way down the page. So I went on a search to see if I could find out what it was, and the suggestions were to make sure the theme was up to date (check), make sure all plugins are up to date (check), make sure my site was up to date (check), try a different browser (check), and clear my cache…well I wasn’t doing that until I knew that’s what is was as I’d only done it a week or so ago and didn’t want to go through the bother of logging in everywhere again. Not yet, not unless I had to.

I had a look on my phone to see if it was doing it on there too. It was. I had a look at my tablet to see if it was doing it on there. It was. And when the poet got home from work I asked him to look at his phone to see if it was doing it on there as well. It was. There was definitely something wrong, and it had nothing to do with my cache.

I wondered if the theme had broken because I couldn’t find any help pages for it and it wasn’t on the table of themes either. So then I experimented with a few more themes. I like the grid, so I wanted a grid theme. And I found 9 plus a non-grid theme, just in case it was the grid. Absolutely nothing worked, although I did like the font in one of the themes I tried, it just didn’t do everything else I wanted, like make all the grid sections equal-sized. The OCD really doesn’t like a grid that isn’t uniform.

At a loss, and really not wanting to clear my history or my cache, I went into my main dashboard to see what I could change there…and that’s where I saw it. There’s a widget page on the dashboard as well as in the themes. And there were all of my widgets, duplicated over and over again. And not only that, but a load I’ve deleted in the who-knows-how-many years I’ve been with WordPress.org were still there as well, in a little section entitled ‘we’ve saved these here in case you want to reinstate them again’, or words to that effect.

I went down and removed all of them, after first copying the codes and details of all those I wanted to keep into a Libre document so I could just copy and paste them back again if it worked.

And reader, it worked. So I went through putting all the widgets I wanted to keep back, and when I was happy it was all looking how I wanted it to (apart from the ticker, I left the ticker off), I changed the font and the page colour. Just because I could.

I hope you like it, I hope it doesn’t distract from your reading. It could have been worse, it could have been an entirely new theme. But this is the first one I’ve kept for longer than a year because I like it.

As you can gather, the poet was already home from work, he’d had a bath, and he’d cooked tea. My day was gone, faffing with tech again. (Sigh!) And everything in the schedule was moved along. Again.

Have a great weekend!

This post appears on Words Worth Writing, Medium and Patreon.