Wordpress

Annual Bloggers Bash Awards: Here are the Nominees!

~ beetleypete ~ 81 Comments

Wow! I have been nominated. 🙂

The Annual Bloggers Bash

After two months of nominations, here are the final list of nominees for the Annual Bloggers Bash Awards 2019!

It’s certainly been an interesting process. Based on the enormous amount of feedback we received last year, we decided to change the categories to ensure that they were less ambiguous and provided an opportunity for the blogging community to receive some recognition for their efforts within the online world in suitable categories. As with anything, some of you were happy about this, while others weren’t. We have tried our best to accommodate as many categories as we possibly could, and in the end had to merge some of them due to just two or three nominations in individual categories at the end of the nomination period.

With a large percentage of our audience being book bloggers and authors, it was inevitable that the book category would be the most popular, but…

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4000 And Counting

~ beetleypete ~ 90 Comments

When I logged on to WordPress this morning, I discovered that I now have 4004 followers. Tipping over the 4000 mark is something to be remarked upon. After all, it is not so long ago that having 100 followers seemed to be an exciting but unlikely possibility. I last posted something like this to celebrate 3000 followers, and it hasn’t taken that long for the extra 1000 to appear.

So, thank you. Thanks to all those who have followed from the start and are still here, and thanks to all of those that joined just this week too. I hope I can keep your attention for longer than a few weeks. I appreciate everyone who takes the time to follow, leave comments and likes, and to engage with the wider community of bloggers.

But. Yes, there’s a ‘BUT’.

I really don’t need any more ‘fake followers’, thanks all the same. Those real estate agents in America who can guarantee to get me a house at knock-down prices in Illinois, or Nebraska. You are wasting your time. I live in England, which you failed to notice, as you didn’t actually pay any attention to my blog. And that Australian car spares company. You keep trying, but the fact that you don’t know I don’t even live in Australia makes me really angry! Then there are all the young ladies, trying to sell make-up and fashion items through their ‘affiliation links’. I am a 66 year old man. I don’t wear make up, and I have never bought a mango-coloured mini-dress, even if it is the ‘colour of summer’. If you actually read anything on my blog, you would know that, and could spend your time more wisely.

Authors. I like to support bloggers who write books, as anyone here can tell you. But if you ‘follow’ my blog by just adding numerous links to your new book or books, you will end up being flagged as a spammer. Be warned. The list goes on, unfortunately. App Developers. Whether or not you follow my blog, I promise you one thing for sure. I will NEVER buy or download your fantastic new App. Even if I really wanted to, I wouldn’t do it, out of principle. And to all you very religious people, who seem to reside mostly in the more remote parts of America, or in Nigeria. I respect your right to believe, I really do. But if you follow my blog with one mention of doomsday, or how your god will change my life, I will just delete the notification email.

At least most of those promising to make me a millionaire in two weeks seem to have abandoned me.

On the plus side, some of the new followers are fantastic people. They read the posts, comment, engage, and seem to really get the idea what blogging is all about. I hope to see them around for many years to come, as they enrich the experience of blogging. If my remarks have upset any prospective followers, I am sorry about that. It is nice to have 4000 followers, but I would exchange that impressive number for just 100 ‘real’ ones, any day of the week.

And while I am on the subject, two reminders. If you do not link your site to your Gravatar, or if you have not posted anything that I can read and comment on, then I am unable to thank you for following. And as I already follow over 100 other blogs, I am currently unable to follow anyone back, just at the moment. So please don’t expect me to. Or ask me to.

Blogging is not Twitter, and it is certainly not Facebook.

**Update** The first four notifications of ‘likes’ I got on this post were all from companies, not bloggers. And some of them didn’t even appear on the post, for some reason. That proves my point quite nicely.

Thanks again, and as always, best wishes to you all.
Pete.

A New Photography Blog

~ beetleypete ~ 36 Comments

All of you photographers out there might like to check out my friend Antony’s latest blogging venture. He is an accomplished serious amateur, and uses Nikon and Olympus cameras. There is a great variety of subjects, and B&W as well as colour. Travel, portraits, nature, exotic lands, and street stuff too.

You don’t even have to leave a comment, as he has not bothered to include that feature. It’s a WP site, so easy to follow too.

See what you think about his work.

https://antonyk.com/

WordPress: Upgrading

~ beetleypete ~ 72 Comments

**Just to make it clear, this is not sponsored by WP, and I get nothing for providing this information**

I have long thought about upgrading my blog to a ‘Premium’ plan. At £7 a month, it is not that expensive, but I was not sure I would really need all the extras provided by the upgrade, short of the large increase in storage space for photos, from 3 GB to 13 GB. However, I have just discovered that they now offer a ‘Personal’ plan, a limited upgrade with twice the amount of space (6 GB) for only £3 a month. I should also soon become beetleypete.com, losing the ‘wordpress’ from the site address.

So I took the plunge, and tried it for one year. I now have plenty of space for adding more photos this year, and you should no longer see any advertisements on beetleypete. I am posting this for information, in case anyone didn’t know about this lower priced upgrade. You have to pay for 12 months in advance, by credit card or Paypal. But £36 is the price of a decent meal in a restaurant these days, so not much to find for a hobby that takes up as much of my time as blogging does.

I am also in the process of getting the photos copied from the hard drive on my old Dell laptop, which can no longer be charged up. If that works out, then I should have a lot more photos to post on this blog.

Old photos, and a modest upgrade, something new for the new year. 🙂

Changing things that already work

~ beetleypete ~ 72 Comments

I have just been reading a post on another blog about the forthcoming ‘Gutenberg Editor’ change from WordPress. In case you are unaware of the impending change, here is a link to Worpress’s take on it. https://wordpress.org/gutenberg/

As you will see, it is quite technical, at least to someone with my level of computer knowledge. I like to keep things simple, one of the reasons I chose to blog on the WordPress platform, six years ago. I also notice that this new system is aimed at helping those bloggers who use a Tablet Computer, or Smartphone. I still use a PC tower set up with a ‘proper’ keyboard. For all the tech-savvy people out there, I suspect this will cause little or no upset. Those of you self-hosting a dot-com blog on this platform might welcome a change to make life easier too, if that is what actually happens.

But as I said, I like to keep things simple. I still use what is known as the ‘Old Editor’. When WP changed to the supposedly ‘Improved Editor’ some time ago, I chose not to leave the old system. So as you might imagine, I am far from looking forward to having the ‘Gutenberg Editor’ imposed on me.

All through my life, I have been constantly frustrated by unnecessary change. The old saying ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ works very well for me. Not all of us can adapt to upgraded computer systems easily, and some of us (including me) struggle to get the best out of the current manifestation of WordPress, let alone one more technical.
Anyone else remember ‘Windows XP’? That was a great operating system, and I still have no idea why it had to change. Oh, actually I do. To make us spend money on the ‘new and improved’ one.

Planned obsolescence is the spectre of modern life. It won’t be long before the CD and DVD disappear, PC towers become obsolete, and if you are not doing everything ‘hand-held’, you are yesterday’s news.

If have a suggestion for WP, and all other such companies. If you want to make changes, sell ‘advances’, and foist unwanted ‘improvements’ on us, that’s fine. Just leave the original system in place, for those of us who just about cope with using it, and will possibly be forced out of blogging by changes we cannot get our heads around.

My Blog: Privacy and Cookies Notice

~ beetleypete ~ 45 Comments

You may be aware that when you press ‘Close and Accept’ on my privacy and cookies notice, it just reloads the page, or stays where it was. I am aware of this problem, and it seems I am unable to solve it. WP Admin told me to remove the widget, and I did. It no longer appears on the list of widgets in my settings.

However, that has made no difference whatsoever, and it still stays there all the time, on every page, even when I look at my own blog. So, sorry about that, but it is only my glitch, and there is nothing wrong at your end. I have got used to it being there now, and stopped noticing it. 🙂