Friday 15 May 2026: Lost in blogs

We had a much better morning yesterday. The poet was working from home, so no stupidly early start. And by lunchtime (or our midday breakfast time), I’d slowly plodded through every single one of the morning’s tasks or chores. 

I had my reading hour over my not-so-dirty cuppa, but I didn’t read a book or a magazine, I read things on the internet again and caught up on social media. Housework hour (or 50-minute pomodoro) was all the usual stuff. I folded and put a washload away, I put a washload through, I fed the birds and the dog, I did the garden patrol, I played with the dog in the garden (and so did the poet), I emptied the dishwasher, got dressed, etc.

And then it was my exercise hour. Standing strength work, floor strength work, weights work, bed pilates. It was nice taking a leisurely pomodoro for each of the different slots and while the bed pilates was longer and harder than earlier in the week, I made sure I took the breaks in between exercises too so I wasn’t worn out or in a lot of pain afterwards, although I’ve shortened the breaks from 30 seconds to 10 seconds. 

We had our breakfast and then we took the dog for his walk. When I was finally at my desk, I started today’s blog post, did the blog rounds, and cracked on with the republishing work. I’d sent Assignment 2 off to WMG Workshops the day before, and overnight it was acknowledged and safe receipt confirmed.

The afternoon was not quite as good as the morning as I disappeared down a rabbit hole at a time when I could really do with not doing that. I decided to revive the old ‘our garden this week’ blog, but could I find it? Could I ‘eck as like, as they say ‘ere oop north. I couldn’t find the secret sugarholic blog either, and I could only find the pictures for that one. Who knows where the pictures for the garden blog went.

The Alphabet Adventurers site is still there, thank goodness, as we’re already starting to move towards reviving that one, starting with our NC500 road trip last year around the north coast of Scotland. 

After far too much time looking for said blogs, I thought about starting new sites over on WordPress dot com but, oh my goodness, has that place changed? It used to be so easy to set up a blog over there, any blog, several blogs. But now they’ve moved not only the goal posts but the entire field!

I did finally find out how to set up a new blog there, but then saw they’ve introduced a new personal rate for everything I had for free before. A new free site has only 1Gb of storage, and over in the States, they’re saying they only have 500Mb.

Well, most of my blogs include pictures and the Alphabet Adventurers has videos too. Would I have to close that down as well?

I pootled on over to Blogger to see what they’re offering at the moment. The good news is that’s still there at least. The bad news is it doesn’t seem to have changed since I was last there, which is more than 10 years ago now. I had a play, though, to see what I could do with blogs over there and I got stuck straight away on uploading pictures.

It was saying I had to log into my Google account. (I was already logged in.) And I had to allow cookies. (Cookies were already allowed.) I did a search and someone said it’s in our Mac settings, but I couldn’t find anything in my Mac settings that looked anything like what they were recommending. 

And then I had a brainwave. DuckDuckGo doesn’t like media of any kind being uploaded anywhere. I don’t know why but I couldn’t even upload epubs to Google Play Books on DuckDuckGo until after I reported a potential bug. There were fixes in the Blogger community for Chrome and Safari and Firefox and…another one…Edge? But the only one I still have on my Mac is Firefox.

So I opened up Firefox, navigated to Blogger, and it let me upload pictures. But they weren’t very good. So I went back to WordPress dot com to have another look for my existing blogs, as I’d seen that only new blogs are restricted to the 1Gb/500Mb of storage. Existing free blogs get a whopping 3Gb! 

And there they were. Well, the secret sugarholic one wasn’t, so I must have deleted that at some stage. But Our Garden This Week was there, alongside Tales From Baggins Bottom and the old Words Worth Writing before I migrated to WordPress dot org. There was another one there too, a debt management site I’d dallied with. 

So, I revived the garden blog. I didn’t add a new post, I just revived it as is, and there’s now a link to it in the menu on here, but the last post was August 2024. And I renamed the debt management one to My Fat Week, requested a new URL, which was granted, and posted a couple of test blog posts as placeholders there just to see how it looked.

It took me another hour or more to work out how to get the menu system working right and how to delete all the old stuff I didn’t want. Plus, I can only use block editor over there, which was another reason I moved to the org, so I could add Classic Editor plugins and widgets. But I persevered, and now there’s a link to the My Fat Week blog too in the menu on here. 

By the time it was all up and working again I was mentally exhausted. It was almost 8pm. Tea was nearly on the table. And I conceded and called it a day.

We don’t have anything planned for the weekend, although we’ll probably go out with the dog, we’ll be visiting the mother in law, and we might get the campervan out for a run. Whatever you’re up to, I hope it’s a good one.