Blogging lessons resumed, I hope…

Computers can make life very difficult. What an understatement…

I had agreed to show some of the members of the Retired on Line computer club I belong to, what blogs are, and how to get started with one.

I enjoy blogging and find it is a great way to share your travels, photos and memories with friends and family Then it is a big bonus when you start to connect with other bloggers from all over the world and follow what they are doing. I have become addicted to the blogosphere and the first thing I do, as I have my morning coffee, is to check the bloggers I am following and see what posts they have put in over night. I hoped to pass on some of my passion for the blog world.

Well I find the WordPress programme quite easy to use and thought it would be just as easy to show beginners how to get started. I found that teaching a subject is not as easy as using it. Unfortunately the internet had an agenda of its own. It went slow, it refused to connect, it sulked and my plan of walking one of the members through and presenting him with a new blog complete with post at the end of the hour did not happen. I did manage to show them where to find help through the excellent WordPress help and forums pages and have suggested that we try again and have another hands on session.

So thank you to you patient friends. It really is easy to get a blog going and if you follow through on this WordPress link and if you have a better internet connection,here is another link you can follow http://learn.wordpress.com/ I look forward to following you on your new creations in the blog world. I am here to help so just give me a call….

Trying to look as if I know what I am doing…

Members of “retired on line” ROL

Burleigh beach

When I got home I went for a walk along the beach.

Burleigh beach

The Pinnacles

The Pinnacles, originally uploaded by gypsy woman1.

The Pinnacles are a very strange group of rock formations. There is a track to drive 4km around them, but we decided to walk around, you can see more and take photos.

Suddenly this family of emus came from behind a rock formation. Father and 6 chicks. It was very exciting to see them, and also a bit of a worry as he started to come toward us. But we stood our ground and managed to get this video before they took off at a jog back between the rocks.

This is the first time I have tried putting a video into the blog so I hope it works….

Well it has downloaded the video, so press the arrow to see the emus …

The Pinnacles have changed since I was here 5 years ago. Like every thing in WA there are far more tourists. There was a steady stream of cars going around the track and a large interpretation centre had been built. Not so many people where walking around the formations. Last time I was here it was almost deserted, no interpretation centre.

Jack has found an interesting shape…

The Pinnacles

Strange shapes..

Galahs nest in the hollows

Emu and chicks

Is he going to attack???

Free camping…

After leaving the rain behind in Stanthorpe we moved on to Allora, the sunflower capital of Queensland. We searched for sunflowers but it is the wrong season, but we did find a bunch flowering in a garden in town. You can’t win them all..

When in town having a look around, we were told about camping for free down at Dalrymple creek. Wow what a find, beautiful sheltered sites and being first there for the day we had the pick of the best position. Soon 2 other vans arrived and we struck up a friendship with them, which resulted in Frank bringing over his early edition, hand built  Maton guitar after dinner, and as the sun went down, he sang a medley of country songs, some of which he had composed. Wal and Kate with little dog Sam joined us and we all swapped stories. It was a magical evening.  They told us of good free, or cheap, camp sites. What a fantastic start to our years adventure, this is the essence of travel, meeting people and hearing their stories and sharing hints and tips to make camping and travelling easier.

Out of our comfort zone…

Here we go....

Well this is it,no going back now, hope we have every thing we want..

Loaded up and ready to roll...

We have our trusty bikes as plan B if we have any problems…

Moving out…

It’s Wednesday, it’s raining and we are almost ready to go.

Wow it has been two very intense days. I keep getting minor panic attacks. Will every thing fit in? Have we forgotten some thing important? I will be so glad to be finished with this preparation period and actually on our way.

The next week house sitting will be like staying in a holiday resort, pool, spa, mini gym, central to all the Goldcoast activities. The casino is only a ten minute bike ride away or two minutes in the van. A great way to wind down, relax and get into travel mode.

Bring it on….

D-day has arrived….

Let's go...

New header…

I have changed the photo in the header to a panorama of Burleigh Beach.A sort of farewell gesture. I had found another unique feature of WordPress that allows you to change the header as often as you feel like it, so tried it out for size. What do you think of it?…

10 more sleeps in our own bed….

WordPress lesson on inserting google maps

As we travel around I would like to be able to put a map of the area we are in. So I went to the WordPress support area to see if it could be done and found the answer was “yes”

So this is a map of the first leg of our trip.. It will be March 4th before we leave but I am getting excited about the thought of going as it is now getting so close.

We have not made any plans as to where we will go after Stanthorpe, and this will be a first for me, as usually, when I travel, I like to plan things almost to the second and have an itinerary worked out months in advance. This time it will be a very broad plan of which direction we will head and leave the details to chance…

——————————————————————————————-

How to insert Google maps

Google Maps

Embeds, Google, Maps, Shortcode

You can easily embed Google Maps into your WordPress.com blog.

1) Visit Google Maps.

2) Type in any street address or geographic location and click Search Maps.

3) Once your map is fully loaded, click on the Link option found on the top right of the map area.

4) A popup will appear, as illustrated below.

5) Place your mouse cursor in the text box titled Paste HTML to embed in website. The code will begin with <iframe. Copy the code.

6) In your WordPress.com dashboard, go to Posts->Add New or Pages->Add New (or open an existing post/page in editing mode). Paste the code directly into your visual editor.

7) Click Save Draft, Update, or Publish depending on the status of your post or page. You will notice that the code has changed. WordPress has converted the HTML code into the working shortcode.

WordPress lesson on slideshows…

This is the presentation I gave to the “Retired on line” computer club in November. I have just found a programme that will put power point presentations into a blog post. slide share.net is a very easy to use programme that you can sign up for and then after you have created your presentation you can then copy the code and insert it into your blog.

It seems to automatically add related slide shows and  don’t think you can delete them or have any control over them.

Another word press lesson…

I am going to write this post in Microsoft word and then see if it can be pasted to my blog. I am also using the font “Georgia”, will it reproduce this also?

———————————————————————————————-

I have inserted the following from word, very easy, but it didn’t reproduce it in the font “Georgia” and reduced the size to the normal size font used by default in the word press posts…

Christmas 2009 is now behind us and we are racing toward 2010. I have great expectations for the coming year and the adventure that lies ahead of us.

 In the meantime I am having a lazy few days and devouring a good book. “What the psychic told the pilgrim” written by Jane Christmas (very appropriate surname for reading at this time of the year). A story of a 50-year-old woman’s pilgrimage along the Camino trail. Told with inner feeling, humour and great insight of human nature.

The first couple of paragraphs rang so true I couldn’t stop reading….

“Impulse is intuition on crack. If intuition is the prudent angel who carefully directs your spirit, impulse is its mischief-making twin, the “imp” in “impulse”.

Impulse scoffs at the notion of second thoughts. Before you can apply a smidgen of rationale to your actions. Impulse has dragged you to the launch pad of adventure, where you find yourself staring bug-eyed at the bungee cord around your waist and asking “How did I get here?”

 

But I think without impulse to charge you on head first into adventure, you may have second thoughts, and would miss out on some of the most memorable moments that as you get older you look back on with satisfaction.

This coming year is in many ways fuelled by impulse….

How I did it…. Click on this small symbol in the menu bar and it opens up to show the “kitchen sink” among these extra symbols is one to enable you to paste from word. That will be very useful as I can prepare posts as we travel along then insert them quickly when we have an internet connection. So I am trying it out to see how it works…..

 

 

More on geotagging…

I was very frustrated yesterday as I could not get the geotagging to work. So I went to the forum area to find some answers. This is a very helpful section of WordPress were you can ask questions and then wait for some one to come up with an answer.

I had two answers to my query.

“Where is public geo data exposed?
Geotagged posts get marked up with the geo microformat, geo.position and ICBM meta tags, and GeoRSS and W3C geodata in feeds. All of this stuff is “machine readable”, not “human readable”; it’s hidden from view.

We’ll soon be launching a bunch of human readable stuff like theme integration, widgets, shortcodes, maps, etc.”

Ok, right….this was my reply

Thanks for reply 1tess,
sorry I do not understand the answer…
Does it mean I can not insert maps yet until you have launched the other “human readable” things?

I then went to bed. This morning I had another look in “forums” and found another response…

It means that if you put in the geotagging data, only search engines and such can see it. Humans can’t.

Staff say they are working on getting maps in there, but right now it doesn’t work.

You could try the Platial mapkit widget, or just put in a Google map according to the instructions in the Support documents.

This is the magic of the internet and WWW at work. WordPress community is a very helpful and supportive group to belong to.

I will try and see if I can work out how to put in a google maps. But enough for one day I must now get a coffee…