Snoskred on Blogging

parent

A Cup Of Tea

12 Comments Posted on by Snoskred

cupotea

Do you like a cup of tea?

Snoskred loves a cup of tea. Bizarrely, her favourite brew was invented by Kevin Rudd, former Prime Minister and foreign minister of Australia. Dude can’t delegate work to others or run a country without getting backstabbed by his own political party, but boy can KRudd blend a tea. He won a competition back in 2011 for his tea blend..

Originally meant to be a limited edition for just 12 months, the Australian Afternoon Tea proved so popular that it is now a permanent member of the Twinings range.

I am not a fan of KRudd at all, but I love this tea blend, and I recently picked up 100 bags for an insanely low price which will last me quite some time.

When and why?

I do not drink tea daily. On a day that I drink it, I will usually brew a cup mid to late afternoon. Rainy or cold days are more likely to result in a cup of tea.

What else do you put in it?

I like honey in my tea as the sweetener. Something magical happens when you combine honey and tea.

For some teas like the Australian Afternoon Tea and various forms of black tea I will use a dash of cream if I have some, milk if not.

For teas that are more herbal in nature like the Madame Flavour range, Cinnamon and Orange, Lemon Ginger, green tea or fruit flavoured teas I will only add a touch of honey and no form of milk or cream.

Here are some of the teas in my tea cupboard –

teas

Overseas readers – want to try the Australian Afternoon Tea?

Shoot me an email to snoskred {at} gmail {dot} com or contact me via the Contact Form with a postal address – don’t leave it in the comments for safety reasons – and I will send you a sealed Australian Afternoon Tea Twinings tea packet, from their range where you buy 10 foil sealed teabags in a box! Make sure to include your blog address if I don’t already read your blog, so I can add you to my feedreader.

Do you like a cup of tea?

Leave a comment to let me know -or write a post on your blog and link to this post. :)

About Snoskred, Aussie Culture, food, NaBloPoMo, NaBloPoMo 2014

Shoe Cleaning Station

13 Comments Posted on by Snoskred

If you have been reading my blog for a while, you might remember my very first Shoe Sunday post – I showed you where my shoes live.

shoes0

I do own a lot of shoes, and every single pair gets a regular clean. What I usually do is wait until a rainy afternoon, when I can’t be doing anything useful outside, and all my other chores are done for a bit, so I do not feel even a tiny bit guilty about spending a good couple of hours with my much loved shoes..

shoes0

First up, I cover the work space with a floor mat – the kind you might use in a bathroom. It is good to use something with a bit of thickness to protect the work space, as there will be times when I am removing stones from the shoes with a metal nail file. I always make sure to have a pair of nail scissors and a metal nail file handy at my shoe cleaning station, because your shoes may have some surprises for you.. like this –

stone

I recently sat down with a couple of freshly arrived TV episodes – Homeland and Downton Abbey, my anti-bacterial wipes because there is a lot of flotsam and poopsam on the soles of shoes. The outside of the shoe get a decent wipe down, the place where my foot sits also gets a decent clean, plus the soles get a really thorough scrub. Here is a pair mid scrub, you can see the suds. I’m using the Kirkland Antibacterial Wipes from Costco.

shoes3

Below you can see one clean sole, and one ready to be cleaned sole.

shoes2

I cleaned 13 pairs in the space of a pleasant couple of hours, while watching teevee. Once the shoes are clean, they are placed on a clean towel so they can dry off. These shoes all went off for a photo shoot right after being cleaned, for future Shoe Sundays here on the blog.

shoes7

Tell a story about your shoes on your blog, and link up below!

get the InLinkz code

germophobe, health, Home, NaBloPoMo, NaBloPoMo 2014, Shoe Linkup

NABLOPOMO – Day 1

4 Comments Posted on by Snoskred

pf1

Zazzy from Zazamataz mentioned here back in September that she might be doing NABLOPOMO this year, and I figured I would give it a go as well.

NaBloPoMo_November

The official website for NaBloPoMo is here.. Everyone has till November 5 to add their blog to the official blogroll via a link in this post.

I gave Zazzy 7 writing prompts which I am going to use myself this month, though I might not get to all of them, and not necessarily in the below order. If you are also posting every day in November and you get stuck, feel free to use these writing prompts.

The prompts are –

1. 1 movie you loved & why
2. 1 TV show you disliked & why
3. Share a “secret” you have never before shared on your blog.
4. Tell us about a quirk or odd habit that you have.
5. Do you like a cup of tea? When and why? What else do you put in it?
6. What are some of your favourite things?
7. What is your favourite treat of all time?

Some of these prompts may springboard into more than one post. If you are looking for more prompts, head on over to the blog of Mark Bialczak – So you asked for prompts, Team Pepper? Nano Poblano – there’s 39 writing prompts there so you’ll be sure to find one that works for you.

I’ll tell you a little secret. I’ve actually written more than 30 posts, and scheduled them. I’m actually scheduled out to mid-December. Some of these posts may get bumped for timely happenings here in Snoskredland.

I wrote and pre-scheduled the posts because.. and I say this with a sense of dread and fear.. I thought I might give NaNoWriMo a go. I’m still not sure but I do have two story ideas and it would be interesting to spend two hours a day just focusing in on telling these stories in my head.

NaBloPoMo Commenting Challenge

So how exactly does one comment on *and* add hundreds upon hundreds of blogs to ones feed reader?

With a lot of patience, dear readers. The official blogroll after just 24 hours lists 292 blogs, after 48 hours there are 411 blogs and there are still a few days to go.

Plus, some bright spark over at Blogher thought it would be awesome to have all the blogs open in a frame and I would have to close the frame in every window to get the blog URL. That really slowed me down for the first 40 or so blogs.

Never fear, I haz technical GURU. The Other Half got technical and made me a links page – You can use it too, if you like. It is here – NaBloPoMo Links – and I will update it once the complete list has been posted, so all the blogs are on there.

If I have not left you a comment yet, never fear

– it is likely that when I dropped by there was not a post I felt like my comment would be appropriate for, but I will be back.

Are you participating in NaBloPoMo?

Leave a link to your blog below so other participants can find your blog easily. :)

Unlike a regular link up – Please link to your BLOG URL, not to a post. :)


get the InLinkz code

challenges, commenting on blogs, NaBloPoMo

NaBloPoMo Reminder

6 Comments Posted on by Snoskred

pan3

When I set up my linky thing, I did it wrong. Thanks to Claire from I will eventually do or say something interesting for giving me a heads up – I have fixed it. You can now add a link to your blog instead of a permalink to a post. :)

I am having a super hard time finding people who are going to take part this year, and the official site still has not posted anything for November yet EDIT – It is finally up here. Everyone has till November 5 to add their blog to the blogroll here. One of the best things for me about NaBloPoMo in past years has always been finding new blogs to read.

I will be trying to comment on as many NaBloPoMo blogs as possible. I’ve set up a google alert for NaBloPoMo to help me find participating blogs. Each day I’ll drop by as many NaBloPoMo blogs as I can to leave a comment. I’ll be adding participating blogs to my feed reader.

So if you are going to take part, or you know someone else who is, or you have a blog yourself, can you let people know about this link up? ;)

Unlike a regular link up – Please link to your BLOG URL, not to a post. :)


get the InLinkz code

November is National Blog Posting Month. To participate, you write a blog post each day for the month of November. The home of NaBloPoMo can be found here. Though, it does not seem to be run by the same people it once was, and they are doing monthly NaBloPoMos there, and there is still no November post! :(

Here are some other NaBloPoMo posts I have found thus far –

The NaMos are Coming! The NaMos are Coming!

How about 30 days of blog writing in November?

NaBloPoMo

NaBloPoMo/Nano Poblano: Important Info! – which led me to –

Team Pepper gets spicy right here, Nano Poblano

Nano Poblano

NaBloPoMo, NaBloPoMo 2014

NaBloPoMo 2014

12 Comments Posted on by Snoskred

bh9

November is National Blog Posting Month. To participate, you write a blog post each day for the month of November. The home of NaBloPoMo can be found here. Though, it does not seem to be run by the same people it once was, and they are doing monthly NaBloPoMos there.

Snoskred will be participating this November – so now is your chance to suggest topics or ask questions you might want answers to, and Snoskred will work them into a blog post in November!

Also, Snoskred will be trying to comment on as many NaBloPoMo blogs as possible. I’ve set up a google alert for NaBloPoMo to help me find bloggers taking part as I am not so sure the “home” site will help me do that. Each day I’ll drop by as many NaBloPoMo blogs as I can to leave a comment..

This is a great way to find awesome new bloggers and new readers, so if you have a blog and you want to take part, get on board the train! ;)

You can link up via this link up tool if you plan to participate, so that other bloggers can easily find your blog – Snoskred will be inviting bloggers participating in NaBloPoMo to join this link up when leaving her comments, and will post the link up at the start of November, midway through, and at the end..

Unlike a regular link up – Please link to your BLOG URL, not to a post. :)


get the InLinkz code

blog housekeeping, NaBloPoMo

Thoughts For Bloggers

1 Comment Posted on by Snoskred

pan3

Tomorrow is the last day of August, so the post scheduled for tomorrow is New Reads for August.

It has been a massive month of adding blogs to the feedreader. The list I will be posting tomorrow is very long, over 100 new blogs.

So I’ve probably been to over 600 blogs this month – for every one I added, there were at least 5 I did not add. Not just anyone gets to jump into my feed reader.

When I added a new blog –

I have visited that blog and read back several pages – at least 20 posts. And let me tell you, some blogs do not make this an easy thing to do.

Using read more tags means I have to open up a bunch of tabs to read the posts. If I already have a bunch of tabs open, I’m probably not going to bother unless the snippets are enticing enough to make me open that blog in a new window and tab up a storm. Sorry. Those read more tags made it too hard for me to get to know that blogger. :(

I read back –

– liked what I saw, then added that blog to my feed reader.

And let me tell you, sometimes that doesn’t work out so well. Some blogs don’t have a feed associated with them! I occasionally have to do all kinds of tinkering to be able to get a feed for some blogs. Sometimes my intent to add a blog ends up with me giving up. Sometimes I’ll send an email to the blogger to mention what kind of issue I had. Sometimes not. It depends on how much time I have.

So, if you are a blogger reading this!

Here is a thought – use a feed reader to read blogs because it makes things quicker and easier when it comes to following the blogs you love – add your own feed to the feed reader so you can keep an eye on your posts and make sure it is showing up how you intended.

Don’t use a feed reader? Need One?

Last month Zazzy suggested Inoreader. Here is a great post on how to use Inoreader. They also seem to have forums and support available.

Some blogs use a partial feed.

That might end our relationship right there. I read over 400 – possibly close to 500 – blogs via my feed reader. If you are going to make me click through to your blog for every post in full, I’m probably out. Even if you are an amazing writer. Even if I really love what I saw on your blog.

If I *really* love your content –

As in I can’t live without it – and you use a partial feed, I recently found a way to get around it.

But this has some serious drawbacks –

– it is unreliable – I’ve been testing it by leaving the partial feeds in my reader next to the full feed and presently none of the full feed posts have arrived while partial ones have

– if people are using this, it means they are not subscribed to *your* blog, they are subscribed to a third party service

– it takes away your ability to get stats on your feed if people are not using your feed

Not to mention –

Do you really want to make your readers jump through hoops to get your content? I’m not a performing dog. :) If I like your post and I have the time, I’m going to click through and comment.

If you give me a tiny snippet and what is there does not seem interesting, I’m not clicking through. Sorry. :( A partial feed can only be a lose-lose when you are a blogger who wants people to read your writing. You are frustrating your readers, and that content you worked so hard on is likely going to be left unread.

You do not need to use a partial feed to get me to your blog – in fact it is more likely to turn me off as a reader from the get-go.

If the reason you are using a partial feed is because you are worried about content scraping, there are things you can do that do not involve a partial feed – like these –

7 Tips and Tools to Stop Content Thieves in their Tracks

Beginner’s Guide to Preventing Blog Content Scraping in WordPress

Note this quote from the Beginners Guide article –

Note: We have full feed because we care more about our RSS readers than the spammers.

Blog Design –

There are some terrible blog designs out there in the wilderness. Egads, people. Some of the stuff I saw was painful to my eyebulbs. But I will not like to re-invent the wheel, I wrote about this some time back and I have gone through and updated the post, removing dead links and slightly changing the text – Blog Design – Open Your Eyes.

blogging tips

Housekeeping part 99 zillion trillion

4 Comments Posted on by Snoskred

range5
Chickens, just chilling.

I’ve updated the blogroll page – the previous blogroll was a code from Google Reader but once they went kaboom the blogroll also vanished..

This blogroll has been hell to create involving the other half, magic coding and secret tricks to alphabetise the list, plus then I had to go through the list and make sure the URLs were correct which involved manually clicking through to each blog.

Please do not think that if you are listed last that means anything other than your blog begins with Z. The list is alphabetical.

In fact, in my feedreader everything is contained within folders, and Zazzy would probably be shocked to know she is in my very first folder which is rather oddly named aaaafaves. Frogdancer and her fellow Aussies are just below in AAussies

ss1

The aLadies folder is where people like Jocelyn from Mama’s Style – Tia Cherie and Suger would find themselves.

But wait, a couple of these are Aussies? Yes, this is true. I have to go through a massive list of new blogs I subscribed to over the past 6 months to work out if they should stay in Ladies or head to Aussies. I was on a fashion blog subscribing spree and not considering the long term organisation of my feeds.

Don’t worry Ladies, you still get read on the day you publish a post – and organising my feeds is presently high on my todo list, after fixing my blogroll and choosing and customising a new blog design.

As I have been clicking through to the blogs on the list, I’ve noticed a lot of them have not updated in a while, some dating back to 2006.

After going through the entire list, there are 321 blogs listed – and that is after I deleted those which went to a wrong place, no longer existed or had not updated since 2007.

I don’t delete a blog from my feed reader unless the blog no longer exists, which means if and when people return to it, I get the next post they write. If it is on my blogroll, it is in my feed reader. :)

My current cut off for the blogroll is – 2008 – if you posted after 2008 and you are in my feed reader, you should have been listed on the blogroll.

If you are reading this and you have a blog and you are missing from the new Blogroll list please let me know in the comments for this post.

Each day I would have somewhere around 150-180 new posts to read. Some of the blogs have 5-10 posts a day, though, so numbers are not really a fair representation of, well, anything.

I’m going to put together a little featurette on some of my most favourite blogs in the world, as well as my most favourite bloggers. I might even try to get some of them to answer a few questions if possible.

————————————-

A small update on the work front – this is going to be a longer process than I’d hoped. I’d love to be able to talk about it here but it would not be especially safe to do so. I might put up a protected post later if this drags on too long because I might want to rage type it all out. If I do, all you need to do to get the password for it is email me – best to use the contact form here on the blog. :)

blog housekeeping, feed readers, work

Back to hating on WordPress

Leave a comment Posted on by Snoskred

Did I ever stop? Not really, no. I have upgraded to 2.7.1 and I find it annoying, clunky, and irritating. And warning, I am going to swear. You will see the F word if you read this post. There will also be some SHOUTING. I wish I could apologise but I need to vent! I am in quite a mood having spent the past 3 hours absolutely fuming.

For the past 2 weeks, I have been trying to figure out a way to solve a problem. We have a new blog that we want to be able to allow guest posting on.

We also had the just-upgraded to 2.7.1 Aussie Bloggers blog, which used the role manager plugin so that I could configure what people did or did not have access to. That worked a treat. Unfortunately this plugin does not seem to be compatible with 2.7.1 at all. People have had problems and the plugin developer seems to have vanished.

So ok, need to find another option. How about what is built in to wordpress? I check out the options. Contributors cannot upload images. Why not, you ask? Some kind of completely fucked up logic somewhere if you ask me. Authors can upload images, but they can apparently also delete everyone elses  images when I visit the image screen. I don’t want people deleting stuff by accident (or even on purpose!) that does not belong to them.

So. What plugins? We upload role scoper. It puts a password on the blog – nobody can access any posts! And we’d uploaded this right before going to bed, I planned to configure it in the morning after a good sleep and because we were logged in we thought everything was working fine, but for people not logged in, they were being asked for their username and password.

Yep, thanks a lot, that annoyed everyone trying to view the blog plenty but when I found out that all night while I slept peacefully people had been unable to access the blog? I was ready to Dexter people!

So we get rid of that idiot plugin. Note to the people making it – perhaps not setting that as a default setting might be a good idea – or at least letting people know that all of a sudden nobody will be able to access the blog until you change the settings! FFS!

I do a lot of searching. I find other things that might do, but they never seem to *actually* do when we install them. So after two weeks of outright fucking about trying to fix this fucking problem with people waiting for me to send them user logins, I decide enough is enough – we’re going to find a solution to this problem today, even if it means uploading role manager to see if it will actually work on our blog, or somehow hacking wordpress, or deading people, or something.

Welcome to the last three hours, in which we tried role scoper again hoping maybe we could configure it to do what we wanted – no go, it is just far too complicated and does not explain things very well, and it adds extra screens to even the basic users screen which is the last thing I want to do to people who are not exactly computer literate. I want to make things as simple as possible.

We try uploading role manager to see if it will work. It does not even appear in the list of plugins. Yes, it is there, but it is NOT there. As in, you cannot activate the plugin because you cannot see it. This seems to be one of a multitude of problems the plugin has in the current build of wordpress.

I search the interwebs – not with google but with scroogle because I hate google for many reasons past mentioned here on the blog. I find a lot of threads on the WordPress.org support forums without any kind of answer to the issue of I want to allow contributors to post images, or answers that say “Use role manager”. Yeah, IT WOULD HELP IF IT ACTUALLY WORKED WITH THE CURRENT VERSION OF WORDPRESS YOU IDIOTS TELLING PEOPLE TO DO THAT OUGHT TO FREAKING QUIT ALREADY!

I can understand everyone wanting to use Role Manager, because it was oh so simple, and wonderful. It was like a piece of heaven dropped out of the sky and into your wordpress dashboard. You had a bunch of buttons – red was the default, green was if you allowed the user to do something. It was utter simplicity. AND IT WORKED which is a bonus these days, apparently.

This plugin may not work as a surprise to you, kthxbai!

I find a plugin which actually allows me to *remove* stuff from the screen for all users below admins, but nothing that allows me to *add* in the upload images button.

I then stumble upon a post somewhere that suggests authors cannot actually delete everyone elses images. Hmm.

Would the delete button be there in the media screen if people could not delete? In a logical world, no. But wait, this is WORDPRESS we are talking about, which is not a logical world. It is a world of fucking insanity. I should have KNOWN this would happen. I should have uploaded an image and tested the delete.

So, I log in as an author, and I try to delete someone elses image. Gold, guys. Absolute gold. Love your work, NOT. When you try to delete someone else’s image, what do you see?

You are not allowed to delete this post.

ORLY? Let us not get into the fact that this is an image, not a post, and focus on the fact that IF PEOPLE ARE NOT ALLOWED TO DELETE WHY THE HECK DO THEY HAVE ACCESS TO THIS, HUH?

delete

Why allow authors to even see that drop down box if they cannot delete anything? WHY?

You know, I am a calm person usually. I don’t get tense about much. I don’t usually hate. But I do hate wordpress right now. Things should just work. End of story.

So now, I have a lot of creating users work to do, which I put off for the last 2 weeks until I had an actual solution. Little did I know, I had the actual solution all along. ROLL EYES AT WORDPRESS.

And you guys know, I don’t usually use the roll eyes. :)

I did find a couple of nice new plugins to test, though. More on that when I know that they actually work. ;)

Annoyed Snoskred, wordpress

Thanks a lot, Bloglines..

12 Comments Posted on by Snoskred

For the last couple of weeks, it has seemed like there hasn’t been a lot of people blogging. I thought maybe it was just everyone being busy, or something. But no. Turns out that Bloglines was doing something odd. And today I log in to see over 500 posts – as I am going through reading them, I realise a lot of them are old posts, dating back to early October.

And so, I missed out on this great post from Artoholic Cindy for 12 days.  As well as other important and great stuff! And it seems it is not quite over yet, posts are still dribbling in.

So if I haven’t been visiting, now you know why – I had no idea you were posting. Looks like I have been trusting my feed reader a little too much! Yes, it is a free service, but you still expect it to work.

feed readers

Comment Timeout.

3 Comments Posted on by Snoskred

I’ve been testing a batch of plugins recently – some requested by bloggers I host blogs for, some that I thought might be good. Unfortunately out of all the plugins I have been testing, only one works with the set up we are all using. That one is Comment Timeout – and in fact is the plugin I thought we’d have the most trouble with given that we do run a lot of comment plugins.

I think it was Lightening who mentioned somewhere around the place how much trouble she was having with spam on the blog. One of the things that I was getting a lot of was trackback spam where spammers are putting trackbacks to my posts with drug names and sex sites etc. It happens a lot on old posts. For example – yesterday there were 25 trackback spams. Today there were 2 – and that is because I allowed comments on posts which had more than xx number of comments. I’m going to turn that off and see if it reduces the spam to 0.

Comment Timeout gives you the ability to close comments on old posts as well as treat trackbacks like comments. We’ll be rolling it out across the blogs on Monday and Tuesday of next week, and I might put together a post on how to use it.

On the not so positive side, it means people can’t comment on your older popular posts. So it is a toss up – do you want to deal with spam, or do you want people to be able to comment on posts you wrote ages ago? For me it is a no brainer – get rid of the spam!

The other plugins broke stuff, so apologies all but they won’t be appearing on our blogs. Unless you want stuff to break, of course. ;)

wordpress