CITY-Lists.com is Back
CITY-o-Clay At CITY-Lists.com
This is the logo for the new WordPress web section for CITY-o-Clay on the CITY-Lists.com website. I realize I should have said “Serving the Polymer Clay Community since 1999″ but it’ll do for now.
For those who don’t know – CITY-Lists is a group of Yahoo Groups that focus on nurturing people’s creative efforts. “Creative Indulgence Totally Yours” is what CITY stands for. The Yahoo Groups are run by volunteers who all go through the same training and orientation so all the CITY-Lists groups treat the members in the same loving manner. Each group has a ModTeam group, one representative from each ModTeam joins the CITYListFounders group to cast a vote on policy issues. CITYLeaders is a group for all the volunteers. This was founded in 2005.
CITY-Lists.com was a web presence for these Yahoo Groups. A place where members of the public can stop and visit to see what each group was about before actually joining. It was our hope that we’d be able to show case artwork of the members. I had registered the domain and started building web sections for each CITY-Lists group using FrontPage 2003 themes. Yes, you can see what problems I was headed for doing that.
Last April, if you read the old blog posts, I was pulling my hair out because my former web host was going belly up. I got a new web host and set out to rebuild my two blogs, one website for my son’s Kung Fu business, and rebuild pages I didn’t have backed up on my personal website.
Poor old CITY-Lists.com languished in the land of the web neglected. I couldn’t add it to my new web host account because it was registered with Ipower
Until the last couple of days. I received a notification that the domain was going to expire and I had to decide whether I let it expire or accept the challenge of rebuilding all the web sections for the CITY-Lists that still remained.
You can see them here on this “Join” page.
I didn’t rebuild them last April because they were all done with FrontPage 2003 themes, which are not recognized on modern browsers. The only option I thought I had was to buy a new web building software and rebuild those web sections the old fashioned way.
Until I realized I could use WordPress themes. I connected the CITY-lists.com domain on to my personal web host account, and I could add WordPress themes in sub directories until the cows come home.
Not only will it make my life easier. It will also enable the ModTeams of all the other Yahoo Groups in CITY-Lists to be able to assign some WordPress savy volunteer to update and edit their web sections after I set them up. All they need is the admin user name and the password I create for them.
Before having volunteers update the web sections for the other groups in CITY-Lists I was giving them the keys to the entire set up. My gig of free tutorials, all the other CITY-Lists groups, everything. Now all the volunteer has access to is their own group’s section. Plus the learning curve isn’t so steep with WordPress as it is with, for example, Expressions Web, which was bought for me by the San Francisco Astrological Society for me to tend their website. I’m fixing to convert that website into a WordPress platform for the same reasons. There are thousands of Themes and tens of thousands of “plugins” to add functionality.
Where did the time go?
The last thing I posted was I was fixing to “reboot” my life with juicing. With the intent in turning around the diagnosis of being “pre-diabetic”. Then I fell in the rabbit hole of changing my life.
I started a Facebook Group “Better Health Now” and there are now 51 members. One fellow, one of the few roosters in the hen house, lost 224 pounds! He’s inspirational to us. A lot of my lady friends who joined me in their life style change gave up process foods, meat, cheese, GMO products, and they turned around their IBS, have more energy and less pain with their Fibro and arthritis. It’s amazing what changing what you eat can do to your over all health.
Yeah yeah, I know it is only logical but we Americans are creatures of commercials and process foods is what we’re exposed to most of the time. Changing one’s shopping, cooking, and eating habits means having to enroll the family as well, which isn’t always an easy thing to do.
I don’t have that problem at home because everyone was trying to enroll me into changing my eating habits before I started on this quest. “Ma, you gotta get off of gluten!” My youngest son says. “Slow carbs, Mom, that’s what you gotta do.” Says my 3rd born. Alright already, I’m working on it. Off spring love to tell their parental units what to do.
I started going to aquatic aerobics once a week. Working out in the fitness center once a week, using the treadmill and stationary bicycle. I should do physical therapy exercises, which are floor exercises, but I have no floor space to do it on. Living like two pounds of lard in a one pound package here. My right knee is less painful with the weight loss though, truth be known.
When my GP asked me how I lost the weight I told her, “I’ve given up everything but casual sex with strangers.” Which is not exactly true. No strangers want to have casual sex with me so … shrug.
I’ve lost about 12 pounds I think, roughly 2 pounds a month, which my nutritionist is happy with. If I lost a lot of weight all at once I’d look like a shar pei dog.
There’s this fellow in the UK who lost a couple of hundred pounds. He has so much loose skin hanging off of him it gets in the way of walking. Knowing that has made me be content with the weight I have lost.
I had a comprehensive blood work panel done on me when I started this life style change and I had another one done 3 months later.
Good news all around. My A1c levels have dropped and if I keep up at this pace I’ll be back to “normal” in a few months and out of the “pre-diabetic” range.
All the other levels that should be down were down and all I need to do is get more exercise to raise my good cholesterol.
I did get confirmation that I have HepC. I sort of knew it but it was never confirmed. I don’t drink alcohol now and when I did I “wasn’t good at it” as my second husband said last fall in Nantucket. He was right. I wasn’t a good drinker. Thank goodness. I don’t take prescription nor illegal drugs so my liver is in good shape all things considering. I do have to be more mindful not to take OTC analgesics like Advil and Tylenol because they are hard on the liver. I have to eat protein at each meal and keep hydrated. I’m taking Milk Thistle tablets for my liver along with multiple vitamins, Vitamin D, and Glucosamine/Chondroitin for my knee.
The added cost of the aquatic aerobics, the supplements, the change in food buying (Never had to get ground Flax Seed for Omega3 or Chia seeds for protein and other nutrition before) has made me have to budget smarter. Not eating out as much and not buying process foods has been a savings. Shopping at the Salvation Army a lot more helps too.
It has taken all this time to get used to the new life style change. Now when I’m faced with food temptations it’s easy to say “No thanks”. I even lost weight over the holidays, which my nutritionist said was unusual.
We had a death in the family. My older sister, Linda, her youngest son Tim died a day before his 29th birthday. Hard to eat when one is in mourning.
So that’s where I’ve been and what I’ve been doing. It is my intention for 2013 to post to my blog more. It’s either that or I tend to repeat myself here at home to anyone who listens.
I’m fixing to go vegan and start juicing veggies
100 pounds overweight, loaded up on steroids and suffering from a debilitating autoimmune disease, Joe Cross is at the end of his rope and the end of his hope...
This is a movie you have just got to see. It is streaming on Netflix and if you don’t have a Nexflix account it is also streaming for free on the “Reboot You Life” website.
My 37 year old son, Tosh Stone, saw this movie last year and has been wanting me to see it. In the mean time he started juicing vegetables and lost 50 pounds. He teaches Kung Fu and now that he’s lost the belly fat there’ll be no more “Kung Fu Panda” jokes around here.
I have been supportive cooking bean dishes for Tosh’s “Slow Carb” eating plan that he mixes with juicing veggies for the nutrients. We’ve made a lot of changes in the kitchen over the last year but still I was not on board with the veggie juicing thing.
Then I had to go to the Doctors because I had some lumps in my armpits. Good news it is not cancer, my blood pressure is normal, as well as my cholesterol levels. Bad news was I am “pre-diabetic”, meaning my glucose levels are a bit high.
Rats. I knew the day would come when I would have to give up the “Whites”: White bread, white flour, and white rice. I’ve been cutting back on sweets, ice cream, and other sugary foods but I was still eating macaroni, white potatoes, and a ton of grain.
You know the food pyramid of old? It used to say that the bottom level, the largest level was grain. I thought “Cool. I love grain.” Now the new food pyramid has to be mostly green veggies at the bottom. Let me see if I can find a picture of the new food pyramid.
Why am I going Vegan? Because after watching a lot of documentaries and listening to a lot of University lectures on Diabetes, Nutrition, and Metabolism I’ve come to the conclusion that cooking foods robs it of vital nutrition that aids us in healing ourselves.
Food is the best medicine
For example the movie “Food Matters”
“Food Matter examines how the food we eat can help or hurt our health. Nutritionists, naturopaths, doctors, and journalists weigh in on topics organic food, food safety, raw foodism, and nutritional therapy.”
The Pharmaceutics industry would like us to believe that there is “a pill for every ill” and the AMA does not train doctors to take into consideration the nutritional profile of the patient.
It is against the law to treat illness with nutrition when most of our illnesses are nutritionally based. We are malnurished, hooked on fast foods that are killing us, and we are told by doctors that taking vitamins “might be harmful”?
Watch the movie Food Matters and if it doesn’t make you want to light torches and storm the castle in protest I don’t know what will. Over a period of 23 years more than 2 million people died from taking medication their doctors prescribed. Medication the research, manufacture, and testing is funded by the very corporations that are pushing them onto doctors. During that same time only 10 people may have died to causes related to vitamins. But doctors are told to tell us that taking vitamins might be harmful. Are you thinking the same thing I am? We’re being screwed by big business. If cancer were cured that’s an industry of billions of dollars a year that needs to be retrained. Pushing drugs via doctors is a multi-trillion dollar industry. We can and should heal ourselves with natural sources, e.g., plant based nutrition.
So why am I aiming to start juicing veggies and drinking the juice? To quote Joe Cross of “Fat, Sick and Nearly Dead” … “To mainline sunshine.” Raw veggies have live active enzymes that are killed when food is cooked. We need those enzymes to help our body repair itself. When you drink the juice the body allows it to be absorbed immediately. When you blend it into a smoothie or eat a salad, the body has to produce different chemicals to break down the fiber. We don’t get the nutrients as quickly.
We are carrying, in our belly fat, all those burgers, chips, sodas, and other fat creating foods. We have fuel to burn. We just need nutrients when we do burn that fuel.
On the “Reboot” program people have lost as much as a pound a day on a “juice fast”. I’m not going to be jumping into a juice fast head first. I’ve been adjusting my diet slowly, will segue into eating fruit and veggies primarily, and some juices. Then after a while I’ll do a stretch of just juices made of kale, spinach, carrots, apples, ginger, and lemon. It’s not your supermarket juice, that has no nutrition and too much sugar. This is high nutrition that also brings along plant protein.
There are testimonials of people who have reversed multiple sclerosis and Type 2 diabetes with changing their eating patterns and upping their exercise. This is my aim. I will back away from being “pre-diabetic” and lose the belly fat, up my energy, regain mental clarity, and all this while being 63 years old. So don’t think that you’re too old to start doing good things to your body.
I’ll be adding YouTube videos I’ve found instructive that backs up my decision to aim for a raw foods vegan juicing life style. I need to take a “before” picture and get a record of my blood lab work and then we’ll see how much progress I’ll make in a month or two. This is just the beginning of the change in my life.
There is no diet. There is only an entire life change. We are not eating for entertainment but to survive in a toxic environment filled with stress.
Wrestling Tech: Linkedin – password changes – Avast
I started out the month wrestling tech video editing software. I use NCH software and all I wanted to do was to flip the video horizontally so the book covers I was showing would be able to be read. VideoPad didn’t have an easy fix. I bought and downloaded more video conversion software from NCH – no fix.
I took screen shots of the book covers, flipped the photos over horizontally in PhotoShop and inserted them into the VideoPad project. That involved adjusting the timing for the sound. Looked good in the project. Saved it as a *.flv movie and uploaded it to YouTube… no photos, no opening credit jpeg either. WTF?
I tried two other formats: *.mov and *.avi, and uploaded those to YouTube – no photos showing.
I checked the saved movie formats in VideoPad and the photos were showing.
YouTube has been stripping the inserted photos inside of movies uploaded in various formats. Workaround: do a screen capture of the photos and insert those as small video clips instead of inserting jpgs. I have NCH’s Debut so I can do that but jeese louise YouTube. Fix the bug!
Each time I saved to movie = 45 minutes, upload to YouTube = 1 hour, so 2 hours per format. I tried 4 formats. That’s a full days work to end up using the original video stock with a caption “I can’t flip these covers over.” under the offending section of the interview.
Ok, then Russian hackers broke into Linkedin and stole 6.5 million passwords and posted them on the internet. Great. I’ve been with linked in for so long the password used there I used in all the basic log ins, which I won’t name, but it’s everything one uses every month to be able to pay online monthly fees.
I have this system when I save bookmarks that I save the url but the title is edited to tell me what username and password I’m using for that log in. I can export my bookmarks as a document, which folks should do to up their browser speed anyway, and it was easy enough to do “find and replace” in a document to locate the accounts I used that old password.
I can tell how recent I registered for something online with how long and convoluted the password happens to be. The shorter the password the longer I’ve had that account. The newer accounts have letters, numbers, and punctuation marks and are 15 characters long.
I spent two days changing passwords, updating the bookmark title with the new password on both my laptop and desk top. I had changed my Facebook password in April and for the life of me I could not remember what it was. I log in to FB automatically so I don’t have to remember.
When I change a password and I get an email notification of that change I forward that notification to myself with the password in the email and then save that email to a folder off line. I was able to go to that folder, go back a couple of months, look for Facebook and there was my changed password recorded where I can find it easily.
I’m a bit OCD when it comes to bookmarks, usernames, passwords, and keeping a record in a belt and suspender approach. I have no idea what other people do who do not have a lot of Virgo in their chart. I feel for them. They must get overwhelmed.
So… if anyone wondered why I didn’t update my website until the 9th of the month, know that I was wrestling tech, gathering the rent, and shopping for groceries. Geek Granny can only do so much in one day and still get her Facebook/Twitter time in for socializing. Hah!
Website Spring Cleaning and Ecommerce
This started out as an email reply to my friend “The OZ”, Rich, no last name because I don’t have permission yet. All he asked was “How you doing?”. Loaded question that and my reply got longer and longer. I figured I should use it as a blog post so y’all will know where I’ve been and what I’ve been doing. For my website visitors this will be another update on “what’s up with those too light photos” Ramble I posted recently.
I’ve been working on my website every day for a week. I think it’s been a week. I’ve lost track of time.
When my old monitor was dying it made the pictures on my website look dark. It didn’t occur to me that it might be my old monitor so I went and lightened the photos. I have a gig of content so that took a long time to do that. When my monitor died and I saw my website properly I realized, to my horror, that all the photos were washed out faded. So I had to go and reverse the damage I had done to the photos, again it took a long time.
Each time I make any changes I “publish” my website to my external HDD. What I didn’t realize was I was publishing the changes to the pages and not the changes to the photos.
When I changed webhosts this last time my webhost was incommunicado. Even their website was malfunctioning, e.g. the page to report a problem was 404 and all my email to them bounced back. That’s why I lost the content to my other two blogs, no way to export the content. I was ok with that because I could upload the back up copy of my website, which I assumed was all corrected.
Wrong.
I uploaded my backup copy to the new webhost and all the corrections to all the photos had not been saved to my external HDD. All the photos I had lightened by mistake and corrected back were all faded.
Ok, I am still unsure as to how the lightened photos were “published” to my HDD but not my corrections.
As a test I corrected some photos on my website, published it to my HDD, checked the copy in my HDD and saw that the corrections were not copied. Next, I took the corrected copies and copied that folder to my HDD, checked the copy of the folder and the photos were copied over. So the labor intensive method worked and the easy way to back up my site did not.
The question of how the lightened photos got copied over to my HDD but not the corrected photos is still now answered. But I didn’t have time to wonder about that I had to correct all the photos on my website that were part of the mistake of being lightened.
Are you bored yet? Hah!
Not only am I correcting the photos, laboriously copying the folders over each time I change a section, but there were unexplained changes in the width of some pages that were otherwise fine. I had to check every page then. As I did I changed the footer to remove some links and that will be a sign to me that this section had been edited.
There were links to websites off site that were no longer working. I’ve had this website for 12 years so other craft or vendor websites blink out like twinkling stars over that time. Like human years vs dog years, computer years are even longer vs dog years. My website has a reputation of being a maze to go through but it’s also a big store house of polymer clay experimentation and discovery.
The upside of this exercise in patience is this: I’ve been given an opportunity to do Spring Cleaning on my website and to review the chronicle of my polymer clay journey. I share my miscalculations as well as my successes, you see, as a way to encourage the new clayers to pick themselves up and dust themselves off and give another effort at a technique they are wrestling to the ground.
Sliced tomatoes: Around 2001 I made some miniature sliced tomatoes that were just magical. It was a flash of intuition as to how to make it look fresh and juicy, capturing the colors of the seeds, and I didn’t record the process. The captions were understandable when I wrote them but when I returned to that mini food section I didn’t leave enough of a trail to follow back to repeat the technique.
5 sliced tomato experiments later: What a pain in the ass. One experiment was done in front of an audience during a webcam demo. The tomato slice of grave disappointment. After the demo I made 4 more efforts and each one got a little closer to what I was aiming for but none replicated that flash of brilliance that my first undocumented effort had been.
I put the photos of each experiment in the tomato section without captions and left them to grow fallow because I was disappointed beyond words. I returned to that section sometime later to add some captions but it was painful to do that because I was still disappointed. I never visited that section via a browser.
When I visited that section via a browser during this Spring Cleaning I was stunned to see that instead of the thumbnail picture and the number of the page being in a table with two cells side by side, as all my index pages are, 4 of 5 of the cursed tomatoe slice experiments had the cells on top of each other in a bizarre staggered stair step manner.
It took making a new index page, manually copying each picture and number of page to the new index, saving it as a temp file, deleting the old index page, and shutting down FrontPage entirely, reopening it up, opening the temp page and saving it as the old index page, to make the correction.
Those tomato slices are cursed I tells ya. Just cursed. When I made effort to perform the “save as” using the old index page name, even when the old index page had been deleted, FrontPage was saying it can’t save a new page as the old page name when the old page was “open”. It was not open it was deleted. The only way around that software glitch was to shut down FrontPage all together and open it again to erase it’s short term memory.
Those cursed tomato slice experiments cost me half a day’s work. http://norajean.com/Food/Tomato/Index.htm
During this Spring Cleaning, review of everything I’ve documented sojourn, I’ve written no astrology forecasts for my astro blog, no entries to my general nattering blog. I did write a “Ramble” that’s a page on my website that I linked from my home page explaining, in a shorter manner, “what’s up with these too light photos” and asking my website visitors to be patient while I correct and straighten up the website after this latest move to a new webhost.
I did take time during the New Moon/Solar Eclipse to set up my e-commerce section. After researching the half dozen electronic shopping cart options through my new webhost i went back with my original plan of using Mals-eCommerce, a free service to small and medium sized businesses, that’s been around for 10 years. Setting up ecommerce has been an on going effort. When I was married to James he’d complain that I’m not selling. I’d go and start the process of setting up ecommerce for my art and then he’d complain that I should have a real job, so I’d stop that and go on the fruitless quest of looking for a job when I’m past the sell by date for an admin in corporations. This happened, I don’t know, maybe 5 times, from 2003 to just before he started seeing the woman he left me for, in 2007.
I took a class in 2008 on how to write a business plan through the Women’s Initiative. I was asked to give the graduation speech for my class. Note the date. The beginning of the recession is when our graduating class sallied forth to start our small businesses.
Since this last New Moon/Solar Eclipse had the promise of effecting the tone for some time going forward I wanted to take advantage of the energy. Anne Ortelee said that each hour of the eclipse equals 1 year’s influence. This eclipse was almost 6 hours long.
Odd way to deal with early retirement
All that day I was digging through my records for my username and password for Mals-ecommerce website. Printing out the FAQ pages on the coding I need to master to set up “buy now” buttons next to my inventory. Setting up a subdomain pointer to a folder on my website. Building that web section a page at a time because I don’t want to have an “instant noodle” turn key look, I want my ecommerce section to look like the rest of my website. http://www.norajean-designs.com/ that’s what I’ve built so far.
When the Spring Cleaning is done on my NoraJean.com section I’ll be going through my inventory here and figuring out what is fit to sell.
I can’t sell any of my sculpted figures because James was a heavy smoker and they are discolored. Customers expect artwork to come out of the box not smelling like an ashtray. Another bone of contention with James and me about my being able to sell my artwork was for him to not smoke in the apartment. Water under the bridge and all that.
I’m going to use this as a blog post for my general nattering blog.
“Short, Nasty, and Brutish” Home Schooling with Miles
How to pay attention to my Home School assignments when Grandma is a distraction?
That’s not the best photo of my grandson, Miles. But it is the most recent and sometimes timeliness is better than aesthetics.
“Do you know that it takes 45 minutes to hard boil an ostridge egg?” I ask my 15 year old grandson, Miles.
“Why should I know this fact?” He asks.
“You might be on a game show and be asked that very question.” Karl offers from the other side of the room.
This is how my grandson is distracted from doing his Home School assignments.
“Who said ‘…life would be short, nasty, and brutish?” I asked Miles.
“Never heard of it.” He admits.
So I google and read this to him.
http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/254050.html
…a quotation from Thomas Hobbes’Leviathan, or the matter, forme, and power of a commonwealth, ecclesiasticall and civill, 1651. The fuller quotation of this phrase is even less appealing – “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”. Hobbes described the natural state of mankind (the state pertaining before a central government is formed) as a “warre of every man against every man”. In the book he outlines the ‘incommodites’ of such a war:
“Whatsoever therefore is consequent to a time of Warre, where every man is Enemy to every man; the same is consequent to the time, wherein men live without other security, than what their own strength, and their own invention shall furnish them withall. In such condition, there is no place for Industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain; and consequently no Culture of the Earth; no Navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by Sea; no commodious Building; no Instruments of moving, and removing such things as require much force; no Knowledge of the face of the Earth; no account of Time; no Arts; no Letters; no Society; and which is worst of all, continuall feare, and danger of violent death; And the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short.”
I did not tell him I’m sharing this with him because there are so many wars that have been going on through his short life. It will be something I’ll return to from time to time.
I may distract my grandson but I’m betting he’ll get a more classical education in the long run. He never heard of H.P. Lovecraft or Philip K. Dick.
“Dude! Philip K. Dick wrote ‘Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep’ the basis of ‘Blade Runner‘, also ‘We can remember it for you wholesale’, which was the basis of ‘Total Recall‘. ” Then I realize from the blank look he’s giving me he’s never seen those movies so he’s most likely never seen ‘A Scanner Darkly‘ or ‘Minority Report‘.
How can I even begin to explain ‘Cthulhu’ and the weird fiction of H.P. Lovecraft? I’m working my way through the entire collection of Lovecraft via my Kindle. It’s free folks, go download it for 99¢. A lot of folks are all giddy fans of ‘Cthulhu’ and have never read one Lovecraft short story. But I digress.
“I think your mother sheltered you from some input.” I said.
“What would I have done without my bad influence friends.” Miles laughs.
“Now you have your bad influence Grandma.” says I.
Miles relayed this story of a school assembly that addressed the topic of bullying. It went from school bullies to cyber bullies and at one point mentioned the “Grandma Rule”. If you were going to write something online would your Grandmother approve if she saw it.
“What if one’s grandma swore like a sailor?” Miles observed, “Would that rule even apply?” Hey WTF are you talking about? Hah!
“Only if you used your other grandmother as the measure. If you use me as a measure you need to be asking yourself ‘Is this weird enough?’ and then ask yourself ‘Would Grandma Stone think this was weird enough?’ then it’ll work.” By then Miles, Karl, and I were laughing our fool heads off.
Miles is getting more done doing his online Home Schooling here, even with the distractions. Yesterday he learned what defenestration meant and in the explanation learned a bit of French. Plus, he got a laugh when I mimed the defenestration of a miscreant. It is good to have one’s grandson laugh.
When I was 15 I was already going steady with the man who would be my first husband and father of my two older sons. Keeping Miles relatively innocent is just that – relative. It depends on who is the relative. Hah! Old joke.
Hootsuite did respond. Imagine that.
Color me surprised when I got a reply from Hootsuite on Facebook. They are aware of the hassle but don’t have a solution. Here is what they wrote. Just sharing for the record.
Thank you for your input.
It seems like disconnecting Facebook from HootSuite is a long process, but I am glad your issues has been solved. We’ve made note of your advice and will try to make this a smoother process.
In regards to your main question , we do not have that capability yet. Being able to add as many profiles/streams as you wish in a scheduled post, seems like a good feature to include in HootSuite. I encourage you to add this in our suggestions page here.
We really appreciate your support and if you have any more questions or concerns do not hesitate to contact us.
HootSuite Support Rangers - http://hootsuite.com/help
feedback.hootsuite.com
HootSuite.com – Web Dashboard Submit ideas, thoughts, and feature requests for the HootSuite that started it all — the web app. For any questions or support requests, please, refer to our Help Desk: http://help.hootsuite.com/ …
What’s up with Hootsuite today?
Arrgh Tech Rant
I think I’ll use this picture when I’m on a tech rant, so y’all can know to skip the post if you’re not deep into geek.
Honestly… I just spent a good couple of hours resetting Hootsuite. As I stated in an early blog post (where I’m pulling my hair) I had to change my Facebook (FB) password. That screwed the pooch with regards to Hootsuite. I did all the steps to reconnect Hootsuite to the FB pages. It worked on the test. Then I scheduled the week worth of forecasts after the successful test.
Today Hootsuite was up the creek again with FB. The scheduled daily forecast went to SFAS Twitter but not to anything connected with FB.
I removed the FB pages and groups from Hootsuite, removed Hootsuite from FB, both a half dozen times, tried it in Google Chrome and Internet Explorer, sent a handful of tests through before things were back to where they should be.
Then I realized that the scheduled posts in Hootsuite have to have the SFAS FB page and group added. One would think that would be an easy thing to do. Not in Hootsuite.
Hootsuite needs to make adding streams to scheduled posts easier. As it is the only way to reconnect the streams that were inexplicably lost is to copy the scheduled post, go to compose post, set it up like it was new, add all the streams, then delete the old post that lost streams during the reconfiguration. Jeese louise. An efficient method would be to click on the scheduled post and add new streams to it. Simple.
Hootsuite has a FB page so I wrote to them saying… “Honestly…isn’t there a simpler way of adding streams to an already scheduled post?” If anything I expect a canned reply, “Thank you for your input blah de blah…”
So I posted the solution that worked for me in the forum. Maybe that’ll help someone else because it seems that FB is not playing nicely with Hootsuite. Especially with the change from the old profile view to the “timeline”. That seems to be one of the problems that other people are having. Somehow it makes me feel a little better that I’m not the only one having the Hootsuite/Facebook connection go haywire for no discernible reason.
420 Time to get NORML
For the record I don’t smoke – anything, anymore. That’s not the point. The point is the laws regarding marijuana are obsolete and unworkable. They cost money to enforce when if marijuana were legalized it could be sold as a product and taxed, bringing in income. The National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws says it better than I can so use their 420 link below to get informed.
http://blog.norml.org/2012/04/20/normls-2012-420-salutations-and-celebrations/
This is NORML’s Public Service Announcement.
“All truth passes through three stages: First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as self evident. Join NORML in our fight to legalize marijuana today and put an end to the War on Drugs. Together we will win.”
8 Myths About Marijuana
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/greg-campbell/marijuana-myths_b_1434718.html
Holy Smoke! Pot Legalization Could Save U.S. Economy $13.7 Billion Per Year
The pictures I am using I found on Facebook. I did not make them. The first one I don’t know who to give credit to because it has been shared and shared again. The second picture it looks like it says Diana Haronis Art.
Geek Grandma Solves The HootSuite Dilema
Whoa, having to change my password on Facebook yesterday caused a problem with HootSuite. Since I do the daily forecasts for the San Francisco Astrological Society’s Group/Page on Facebook it comes in through my personal FB account (can’t be helped). So if my personal FB’s account’s PW gets changed HootSuite blocks the scheduled forecast from being sent to three locations: on my wall, on the 2 locations for SFAS. I realized that when I looked for the forecast today at 1pm.
Yikes, it wasn’t there!
So I hustle on over to HootSuite and see that those posts were in RED on the past scheduled items, meaning there was a problem in posting. Double YIKES! After a couple of efforts and then a frantic search online for FAQs I discovered the solution.
I had to remove HootSuite from my FB, remove my FB from HootSuite, log out of everything and clear my cache and cookies. Oh great. That means I have to relog into everything else like Yahoo Mail, my Twitter, and I’m checking other sites I usually can just click to log into. I wouldn’t mind if having to change my FB PW was caused by some untoward thing I did. But it wasn’t. I just tried to share a YouTube video like I do everyday and a red flag went up and I had to change the PW after jumping through “prove you are you” hoops.
The next phase of untangling this knotty bit of virtual needlework is to log back into FB with my new danged PW, then log back into HootSuite to add FB as a social network, then go through the steps of allowing it to access all my personal crap on FB (which I really do not like, but it can’t be helped presently), that means that all scheduled HootSuite posts do not have my FB scheduled on them. Edit all scheduled HootSuite posts by copy, paste, add all streams, schedule post, delete old post.
Honestly HootSuite couldn’t come up with an easier or elegant way of correcting what is possibly a very common situation? I have to remind myself that HootSuite is a free service for how I use it in my volunteer positions.
Now that it is all fixed I’m a happy Geek Grandma. I decided to chronicle my web wrangling here on this blog. I can’t share any of this with my family because their eyes glaze over like Krispie Kream donuts. I’m the one who sets up the router, configure new computers, create blog/websites for the family, research and purchase software. I do all but coding software and I’m getting close to doing that because of wanting to edit my WordPress ini.php file. Without someone close by to share my tech woes I shall blog. The tags will warn you if that’s the track I’m on for a post.
I still have to write the weekly forecasts for SFAS and schedule them in HootSuite. I have until Saturday 12:30pm to get them up so I’m going to relax for a minute and finish my coffee.
